Federal judges announce they will refuse to hire clerks from Stanford Law School woke students

Two federal judges of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, both appointed by the former president Donald Trump, have announced that they will no longer hire paralegals from Stanford Law School.

The boycott is in response to mistreatment by a fellow judge during a recent visit to the California school.

Justices James Ho and Elizabeth Branch had previously announced a similar boycott of Yale Law School last year, after a series of free speech incidents in which they complained about the school’s “cancel culture” approach. .

The boycotts will only apply to future students and not to those currently enrolled as law students at the school.

“We will not hire any students who choose to attend Stanford Law School in the future,” Ho said during a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics.

Yale and Stanford Law Schools are some of the most prestigious law schools in the country and have produced numerous prominent leaders, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, at least five current United States Senators, and four current Supreme Court Justices.

Ho called Fifth Circuit Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan’s treatment “intellectual terrorism.”

Duncan was criticized by hundreds of students and berated by Stanford’s dean of diversity, Tirien Steinbach, during his visit to the law school last month.

The students called him ‘scum’, asked him why he couldn’t ‘find the shit’ and yelled: ‘We hope they rape your daughters’.

Steinbach is currently on leave and Stanford has ruled out disciplining hecklers, who the school itself admitted violated its free speech policy.

Duncan was greeted with posters along the walls of the prestigious university, saying he had committed crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people” in reference to a case.

In early March, he was asked by the student chapter of the conservative Federalist Society to give a speech at the famed law school about the Circuit Court of Appeals, but was met with insults.

Associate Dean Steinbach chimed in during the shouting, but instead of calming down the students, she began piously lecturing Judge Duncan for six minutes using previously prepared notes.

Law school dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavinge have since “formally apologized and confirmed that the protesters and administrators had violated Stanford policy” days later.

In his speech, Ho argued that Duncan’s treatment reflected “rampant” viewpoint discrimination at elite law schools, some of which do not employ a single centre-right professor.

“Rules are not rules without consequences,” Ho said. And students who practice intolerance do not belong to the legal profession.

He implied that a more politically diverse faculty and a less ideologically uniform administration would go a long way to lifting the boycott.

“How do we know that everyone’s views will be protected, if everyone’s views are not represented?” Ho asked.

“What some law schools tolerate and even encourage today is not intellectual exploration, but intellectual terrorism,” Ho suggested.

‘Students don’t try to get involved and learn from each other. They engage in disruption, intimidation, and public embarrassment. They try to terrorize people into submission and self-censorship, in a deliberate campaign to eradicate certain views from public discourse,” he added.

‘Law schools like to say they are training the next generation of leaders. But the schools aren’t even teaching students how to be good citizens, let alone good lawyers. We are not teaching the basic terms of our democracy.

Ho’s announcement is the latest dramatic effort to hold Stanford accountable for its treatment of Duncan, and he hopes his colleagues will do the same.

In an interview after the Standford incident, Judge Duncan said the entire debacle was an embarrassment that made him fear for the future of the country.

‘This is one of the best law schools in the world. The students are the cream of the crop. Future judges, senators, presidents, industry leaders.

“And yet here is a crowd of the best and the brightest, yelling at a federal judge who has been invited to campus, thus showing that they have absolutely no understanding of the basic concept of legal discourse: you have to meet reason with reason. Instead, its operating principle is: if I don’t like what you say or think, I’ll silence you.

“Unless those students undergo a radical change in their total approach to argument and disagreement, they are not eligible for membership in any bar association,” Duncan said.

He said that he sympathized with the other students who had gathered to hear him speak, but missed the opportunity.

“The attack was intimately personal and, frankly, disgusting. If I talked to a dog the way those students talked to me, I would be embarrassed.

Since the Yale Law School boycott was announced, Ho and Branch are two of 14 federal judges boycotting the school over a series of high-profile free speech scandals.

The boycott appears to be having an impact, with students and faculty urging Ho not to compromise and citing an improved climate on campus.

“Imagine all the judges who say they oppose discrimination at Yale and Stanford take the same path,” Ho said. ‘Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools will stop discriminating then?’

The judges hope that their boycotts will persuade their colleagues to do the same, and that schools like Yale and Stanford will address their discrimination problems to regain their prestige and reputation as top law schools.