Experts Say Law Schools That Shut Down Speakers With Opposing Views Are Killing The Legal Profession

In the past year, protestors at Stanford University, Yale University, University of California, San Francisco, and Georgetown University have attempted to silence speakers because of their political views. Experts argue that if law schools do not teach students how to respect free speech in school, this lack of regard will be reflected in the legal profession when the students graduate.

March 17, 2023

CeCe O’Leary, an attorney for the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF), told The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), “As future lawyers, law students have an ethical obligation to respect the rule of law. When law schools fail to enforce their own heckler’s veto policies, they abdicate their duty to teach respect for the law.”

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Meanwhile, Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said law schools should be “dedicated to resolving disputes through reasoned debate, not through shouting down contrary views” and warned that law students’ heckling bodes ill for their future as lawyers and for the legal system more broadly.

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At a recent event at Stanford Law School (SLS), Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan was heckled by students and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach during a discussion about COVID-19, guns, and Twitter. Steinbach responded to Duncan’s call for an administrator to calm the room by asking him to reflect on whether his speech was “worth the pain that this causes and the division.”

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At the same time, students shouted phrases such as “your racism is showing” and “respect black women.” Cherise Trump, Executive Director of Speech First, told the DCNF, “The behavior by the disrupters and the apparent encouragement by campus leaders not only normalizes these childish tactics, but it also normalizes the idea that if someone holds a different opinion, then they are your political enemy and should be eliminated from the field. This type of thinking is incongruent with American jurisprudence and could seriously threaten the reliability and confidence in our legal system.”

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When students are allowed to disrupt speaker events, they learn that “suppression, rather than reasoned debate, is the right way to resolve disputes,” according to Volokh. Heckling is unconstitutional, and law schools are not doing a good enough job at “educating students about their First Amendment rights—both what they include and what they do not include,” O’Leary said.

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Experts also warn that the trend of heckling and disregarding free speech rights goes beyond Stanford, with examples found at several other universities nationwide. According to Bill Jacobson, founder of the conservative non-profit Legal Insurrection and director of the securities law clinic at Cornell University, these disruptions are symptoms of a deeper problem of ideological uniformity at most law schools and intolerance for dissenting viewpoints. Surveys have found that college students are afraid to voice their opinions on campus for fear of retaliation by peers or faculty members. The results revealed that conservative students are likelier than their liberal peers to feel like they can’t speak freely.

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Public universities are bound by the First Amendment, while many private universities, such as Stanford, “promise First Amendment-style free speech rights,” Haley Gluhanich, a program officer at free speech watchdog Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the DCNF. However, these policies are not always enforced. Gluhanich said schools that fail to protect speech “would only further encourage hecklers to use such tactics to stifle expression they disagree with, which will lead to fewer speakers, fewer ideas being shared, and fewer conversations.”

Kimberly Hermanm, SLF general counsel, told the DCNF, “When law schools not only allow, but in some cases encourage, their students to heckle and shout down speakers, they embarrass the entire legal profession.”