U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho announced Saturday that he and Judge Elizabeth Branch will not hire clerks from Stanford Law School after last month’s attempt to silence Judge Kyle Duncan.
Last year, Judges Ho and Branch had also announced a boycott of clerkship applicants from Yale Law School, the Washington Free Beacon notes, in protest of that school’s “cancel culture” toward conservative views.
As Breitbart News reported, Judge Duncan was shouted down by protesters at Stanford last month who objected to his conservative views on LGBTQ issues. A dean in attendance backed the protesters, not the judge.
Stanford apologized to the judge — though the dean in question, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, did not, and wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending her actions.
Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez wrote a ten-page letter about the school’s policy on free speech. But that, according to Ho, was not enough.
He told an annual gathering of the Texas Review of Law & Politics:
These three elements are plainly missing at Stanford Law School. Just look at the ten-page letter that was recently issued by the Dean. I know that letter has been praised by some people for standing up for free speech. I don’t share that view.
…Well, here’s the problem: The words in that letter are not accompanied by concrete actions. Because it imposes zero consequences on anyone. It doesn’t even say whether there will be consequences if there’s a disruption in the future.
…These problems aren’t unique to one or two schools. But I think it’s obvious why so much attention has focused on one or two schools. It’s because they present themselves as the nation’s best institutions of legal education. Yet they’re the worst when it comes to legal cancellation. Moreover, what happens at these elite schools impacts the profession and the country.
The Fifth Circuit includes Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas.
Judicial clerkships are coveted jobs, especially at the appellate level, because they provide valuable training and can be stepping stones to Supreme Court clerkships.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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