Education

Georgetown University Law Center Decides To Teach Systemic Racism Rather Than Law

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Well, it looks like this is going to be All-Race Wednesday. Sorry: I wanted it to be “Don’t Say Gay” Wednesday, but I don’t completely control these things. Incidentally, I know everyone is thoroughly sick of the Will Smith matter. However, the cultural implications of what should have been a meaningless blip are significant, and both this morning’s first post the comments to it are worth reading.

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The last time I relied on the Washington Free Beacon, I was hoaxed by an inappropriate “satire” article that, was subsequent events have sadly proved, was too close to reality to signal that it was fake. So I checked this Free Beacon exposé on Georgetown Law Center, my disgraceful alma mater, particularly carefully, hoping it was a bad joke. It isn’t.

Ironically, just yesterday two old friends emailed me about whether I would be attending the class reunion next month, a major one. After reluctantly telling them that I could not, for the many reasons I have discussed here and here, most lately the Dean’s suspension of  professor Ilya Cohen for daring to suggest that limiting a Supreme Court nomination by race and gender was not the best way to ensure the most able jurist would replace Justice Breyer, I started having second thoughts. Was I just being an old poop, one of those alums who are bitter that things aren’t like the old days? Why not just accept it all and party with pals?

Then I saw the report. That graphic above is a slide from a First Year mandatory property course, one of many re-published by the Free Beacon. It reports in part, Continue reading →

Tuesday Ethics Afterthoughts, 3/29/2022: A Cheat Sheet, Mask Mayhem, And More

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

(THERE IS NO GOOD GRAPHIC FOR “AFTERTHOUGHTS”)

The 29th is another of those ill-starred days in U.S. ethics, topped off in 1973 by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the half-way war that was an ethics train wreck for decades. Two years earlier, on the same date, Lt. William L. Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder by a U.S. Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Calley, a platoon leader, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians including women and children on March 16, 1968. Ten years before Calley’s conviction, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. They were executed in 1953, a flashpoint in the schism between the American Left and Right that still is a sore point. (Ethel appears to have been a genuine villain.)

1. I thought this was a hoax. It’s not, unfortunately: someone got a photo of the cheat cheat for “talking points” that President Biden was holding when he massacred his explanation for his Russian regime change outburst in an exchange with Peter Doocy.

This does not fill me with confidence. You? The ethical value at issue is competence.

2. The propaganda and misinformation continues. Though some recently departed here could never grasp it, honest and trustworthy newspapers shouldn’t be publishing falsity and partisan propaganda in house opinion pieces. That’s when the opinion is offered using misleading or incomplete facts—deceit–and the New York Times does it almost every day. I can’t trust a group of editors who permit that. Examples:

It’s incredible how quickly we’ve normalized the fact that the last president tried to retain power despite losing the election and that a mob he incited stormed the Capitol. Many people took part in the effort to overturn the election — among them, we recently learned, the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice, who hasn’t even recused himself in cases about the attempted coup.

The President in question wanted to challenge the results of an election he believed was the result of illegal manipulation, and as President, he had a duty to do that. I know Krugman isn’t a lawyer, but incitement is a term of art and a crime, and Trump did not “incite a mob” by addressing a crowd. Saying Justice Thomas “hasn’t even” recused himself because of the completely legal communications of his wife falsely implies that doing so is required or the justification for him to do so is undeniable. It isn’t. Editors should not allow such deliberately confusing and misleading opinion material Continue reading →

Ugh. Masks Again. My Breaking Point Is Getting Nearer…

/ Jack Marshall / 48 Comments

Last night in Northern Virginia, I waited to be served at a SubWay behind a young, apparently well-to-do mother and her two children, no more than 5 or 6 years old. All three were tightly masked, though in the cloth variety that are—yes they are— virtually useless. The two women behind the counter were masked, of course, for business and PR reasons. I wasn’t. Also in front of me was a young African-American woman (who ordered a BMT with cucumber, mayo, mustard, oil and vinegar) who also wore a cloth mask, while two young men behind me were unmasked.

For about the tenth time in recent weeks, I had to wrestle my tongue to the floor to avoid asking the masked women in line, “Pardon me, but why are you wearing those things?” and the mother “Why are you forcing those tiny children to walk around with half their faces covered? (I also wanted to ask the woman in front of me, “Mayo, mustard, oil and vinegar all on an Italian sub? What are you, nuts?” But that’s another issue.) Once again, I resisted the urge, but I can feel myself nearing the point where I’m going to do it. In fact, I’m nearing the point where I think it is the duty of Americans who care about the culture, societal values and future as a democracy to challenge the maskers, especially those who are abusing and warping their children.

These people should be made to defend their conduct. It’s not a private matter, not when masks carry a message and send messages to others. There appear to be two varieties of masked Americans, one pathetic and the other sinister: those who wear masks as a symbolic show of solidarity with the statist, totalitarian Left that wants the government to train the “little people” to do and believe what they are told, and those who have been turned into lifetime germaphobes and agoraphobes by media scaremongering, inflated death statistics and incompetent health officials. Every day, in tiny, incremental ways, these two, sometimes overlapping groups are tearing down American individuality, liberty, and the quality of life.

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Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Pledges To Recuse Herself From The Harvard University Affirmative Action Case

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

And that, as they say, is that.

I was wrong, Prof. Turley was right. He was certain that Jackson would recuse from the case because of the screaming conflict she faced by sitting on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He wrote,

“It would be profoundly inappropriate for a jurist to sit on a case for a school in which she has held a governing position and a role in setting institutional policies. This would be akin to a justice sitting on a case on oil leases for Exxon while being a member of the oil company’s board of directors.”

I wrote, “That’s exactly right. But I bet Jackson doesn’t recuse.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Month: D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Laurence Silberman

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“The latest events at Yale Law School in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech prompts me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified for potential clerkships.”

—Judge Silberman in a letter to his fellow judges, in reference to the disruption of a March 10 panel at Yale Law School that was intended as a debate over civil liberties  hosted by the Yale Federalist Society. About a hundred students attempted to prevent the panel and Federalist Society members in attendance from speaking.

Well, you know: Yale. Equally disturbing, perhaps, was that Ellen Cosgrove, the law school’s associate dean, attended the panel, was present the entire time, and did nothing to restrain the protesters nor remind them of their ethical duties.

The school has a policy that specifically condemns such speech-chilling conduct, but more than 10 days after the event, no consequences appear to be forthcoming for the privileged and arrogant thugs who are going to be entrusted with the task of protecting future attacks on Constitutional liberties.

In an editorial endorsing the judge’s suggestion, the Wall Street Journal wrote in part,

Some readers may think these students should be forgiven the excesses of youth. But these are adults, not college sophomores. They are law students who will soon be responsible for protecting the rule of law. The right to free speech is a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution. If these students are so blinkered by ideology that they can’t tolerate a debate over civil liberties on campus, the future of the American legal system is in jeopardy.

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Ethics Dunce: Friends University (Kansas), Or “Why Do Colleges Find That Free Speech Thingy So Complicated?”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Cutting to the metaphorical chase: Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, refused to allow a student recital honors project titled “The Shows They Don’t Want Us to Produce: A Study of Censorship Throughout the History of Musical Theatre,” to take place on campus. Yes, Caitlyn Fox’s show about censorship was censored.

Brilliant.

Some of the songs Fox would sing in her recital were “Aquarius” from “Hair,” “Maybe This Time” from “Cabaret,” “Gethsemane” from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Schadenfreude” from “Avenue Q” and “My Unfortunate Erection” from “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” among others. The program had been approved, Fox had been assured that all was well, and then the university’s vice president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty sent Fox an email that kicked the recital off campus. He wrote in part:

“I’m writing to let you know that in the past few hours we have received significant complaints from staff members and donors regarding [your] Recital/Honors Project. People who have worked at and/or supported the university for a long time are considering withdrawing their support if we move forward with having the recital at Friends.”

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Integrity Test: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Will Be Conflicted Out Of The Harvard Affirmative Action Case If She’s Confirmed. Which Progressives Will Have The Ethics To Say So? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

And will she?

Stipulated: Judge Jackson is a fully qualified choice to succeed Justice Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court. Also stipulated: she should be and will be confirmed and by a large majority, unless Republicans are as petty and foolish as I think they are.

However, the soon to be Justice Jackson has an unwaivable conflict of interest in the contentious Harvard admissions case, which I would term a “scandal.” Harvard unambiguously discriminates against Asian-American applicants to inflate the numbers of lesser qualified black and Hispanic students admitted to the college. In the era of The Great Stupid, when racial discrimination is treated as “antiracism,” this SCOTUS case is a high profile and significant one, and Future Justice Jackson has a dog in the hunt, as they say. Jackson serves on Harvard’s board of overseers, one of the University’s two governing boards. The board plays “an integral role in the governance of the university.” End of controversy. She’s integrally involved with a party in the case. It is a classic conflict, and cause for recusal. Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: Criminal Defense Attorney Scott Greenfield

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“A perpetual concern, particularly in criminal defense, is that the next generation of lawyers will lack the skills needed to do their job, to zealously represent their clients. They struggle to tolerate the language we encounter in the ordinary course of our work. They are blinded by hatred of their prosecutorial adversaries, the law enforcement witnesses, the judge who denies their pleas for “justice.” Can they mount effective arguments against their clients if they can’t tolerate hearing arguments with which they disagree?”

—Criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield, on his blog “Simple Justice,” reacting to the law students at UC Hastings shouting down Georgetown Law professor Illya Shapiro, who was supposed to be engaging in a civil debate with a Hastings professor.

Ethics Alarms discussed the Hastings incident here [#4]; I should have probably made a solo post of it, because as Greenfield correctly points out, it has wider implications. Later he writes,

The reaction to these students was split, with many woke law students and baby lawyers applauding their action while more experienced lawyers were appalled at what they viewed as a failure of a law school, of law students, to demonstrate the minimal capacity to engage in the manner that will be expected of them as lawyers. If tactics like this are what law students deem acceptable, will they ever be capable of being lawyers?

Continue reading →

At Columbia, Free Speech Chilling Takes A Great Leap Forward

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

The assault on free expression as well as the speech-chilling practice of seeking to publicly crush those who do not observe the social justice dictates of progressives in power advanced ominously yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the episode at issue occurred at an Ivy League University, as our educational sectors have been among the trailblazers in speech and idea suppression. Unsurprising to me at least was that it involved Twitter. Just like in the Illya Shapiro controversy at Georgetown Law Center, a scholar didn’t use quite the words he should have (to be safe, and safety is everything these days) according to the Democrats’ Little Red Book. This time, however, the hammer fell harder. Continue reading →

Good Start, Binghamton U….Now Fire Her.

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Binghamton University (NY) Professor Ana Maria Candela’s Introduction to Sociology syllabus originally stated that white students had to wait for “non-white folks” to talk before speaking up or asking questions, according to the syllabus.

In another charming section, Candela’s syllabus also included a quote from Chinese dictator Mao Zedong: “No investigation, no right to speak,” which she interprets benignly to mean, “Don’t speak until you know something.” I question the wisdom of quoting a Communist despot extolling “investigation,” but OK. Candela’s rules on class participation, however, embraced “progressive stacking,” which conditions “students’ participation and speaking based on their race and gender.” Continue reading →