(Washington Stand) If there’s anything more inappropriately disrespectful than future lawyers shouting down a federal judge, it’s not-yet-credentialed (or supposedly educated) law students creating a “hostile environment” for their own professor and dean. Yet that’s exactly what happened Monday at Stanford Law School.
The drama began Thursday, March 9, when hecklers shouted down Kyle Duncan, a judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, at an event on “COVID, Guns, and Twitter” hosted by the campus’ chapter of the Federalist Society. When Duncan asked school administrators to restore order, associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) Tirien Steinbach commandeered the microphone and echoed student’s false attacks on the judge.
Law school dean Jenny Martinez wrote in a Friday email to the school, “It is a violation of the disruption policy to ‘prevent the effective carrying out’ of a ‘public event.’”
On Saturday, university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Martinez wrote Judge Duncan a letter of apology, admitting that “what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech,” and that “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in appropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.” (Read More)