US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3897

But here’s where things went off the rails. When the Stanford FedSoc president (and openly gay man) opened the proceedings, he was jeered between sentences. Judge Duncan then took the stage—and from the beginning of his speech, the protestors booed and heckled continually. For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him, with exclamations like "You couldn't get into Stanford!" "You're not welcome here, we hate you!" "Why do you hate black people?!" "Leave and never come back!" "We hate FedSoc students, f**k them, they don't belong here either!" and "We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!"

Throughout this heckling, Associate Dean Steinbach and the University's student-relations representative—who were in attendance throughout the event, along with a few other administrators (five in total, per Ed Whelan)—did nothing. FedSoc members had discussed possible disruption with the student-relations rep before the event, and he said he would issue warnings to those who yelled at the speaker, but only if the yelling disrupted the flow of the event. Despite the difficulty that Judge Duncan was having in giving his remarks, plus the fact that many students were struggling to hear him, no action was taken.

After around ten minutes of trying to give his remarks, Judge Duncan became angry, departed from his prepared remarks, and laced into the hecklers. He called the students “juvenile idiots” and said he couldn’t believe the “blatant disrespect” he was being shown after being invited to speak. He said that the “prisoners were now running the asylum,” which led to a loud round of boos. His pushback riled up the protesters even more.

Eventually, Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to help him restore order. At this point, Associate Dean Steinbach came up to the front and took the podium. Judge Duncan asked to speak privately between them, but she said no, she would prefer to speak to the crowd, and after a brief exchange, Dean Steinbach did speak. She said she hoped that the FedSoc chapter knew that this event was causing real pain to people in the community at SLS. She told Judge Duncan that “she was pained to have to tell him” that his work and previous words had caused real harm to people.

“And I am also pained,” she continued, “to have to say that you are welcome here in this school to speak.” She told Judge Duncan that he had not stuck with his prepared remarks and was partially to blame for the disruption for engaging with the protesters. She told Judge Duncan and FedSoc that she respected FedSoc’s right to host this event, but felt that “the juice wasn't worth the squeeze” when it came to “this kind of event.” She told the protestors that they were free to either stay or to go, and she hoped they would give Duncan the space to speak—but as one FedSoc member told me, the tone and tenor of her remarks suggested she really wanted him to self-censor and self-deport, i.e., end his talk and leave.

“This invitation was a set-up,” Judge Duncan interjected at one point while Dean Steinbach criticized him. And I can see what would give him that impression: as you can see from this nine-minute video posted by Ed Whelan, when Dean Steinbach spoke, she did so from prepared remarks—in which, as noted by Whelan, she explicitly questioned the wisdom of Stanford’s free-speech policies and said they might need to be reconsidered. (At least at Yale Law School, Dean Heather Gerken had the decency to criticize disruptive protesters, instead of validating them.)

As you can see from the video, about half of the protestors eventually left at the direction of a student protest leader, with one of them charmingly calling the judge “scum” as she walked out. Yet the heckling continued, and still the administrators did nothing to intervene. Eventually, the student-relations representative tried to intervene once it had become clear that the event was out of control—but Judge Duncan then criticized him, telling him that he should have acted sooner.

Not getting traction trying to give a speech, Judge Duncan moved on to the question-and-answer session, and the protestors quieted down enough to ask a few questions. The questions—and answers—were generally contemptuous. As the judge put it to me, while he’s generally happy to answer questions when he speaks at law schools, the questions he received at Stanford were not asked in good faith; in his words, they were of the “how many people have you killed” or “how many times did you beat your wife last week” variety.

At one point during the Q&A, Judge Duncan said, “You are all law students. You are supposed to have reasoned debate and hear the other side, not yell at those who disagree.” A protestor responded, “You don't believe that we have a right to exist, so we don't believe you have the right to our respect or to speak here!”

Finally, the event concluded when the heckling was so disruptive and Judge Duncan was so flustered that it could not continue. One source told me the event ended about 40 minutes before the scheduled end time (although a second source told me they thought it ran for a bit longer). So defenders of the SLS protest might argue that technically the judge wasn’t “shouted down,” since he did get to speak for some amount of time. But it was difficult for many to hear him, and it’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of free speech in American law schools if the ability to get out a few words is the standard for acceptable events. (As for why shouting down speakers is not itself a legitimate form of “free speech,” which is what a number of Stanford protesters claimed, I refer you to one of my earlier stories about Yale Law, as well as this post by Professor Eugene Volokh over at Reason.)

After the event, Stanford FedSoc members asked Dean Steinbach for her thoughts. She asserted that nothing the protestors had done violated the Stanford disruption policy and that the event had been “exactly what the freedom of speech was meant to look like—messy.” She said that if Judge Duncan had wanted to give his remarks, he should have just kept reading them, and she claimed that he was disrespectful to the attendees.