Stanford Law School

Comment Of The Day: “Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

EA has featured a lot of posts about the Stanford Law shout-down of a conservative federal judge and the school’s “DEI” dean’s complicity in making certain that he did not get a fair opportunity to deliver his remarks. It is, I believe, quite possibly a tipping point regarding many important cultural issues, including Leftist censorship, the decline of higher education ethics and academic freedom, the corruption of the legal profession, and most of all, the toxic influence of the “diversity/equity/inclusion” cult to undermine core societal values in the U.S. The mainstream news media is doing its best to keep the story and its implications far from the consciousness of the average member of the public.

Glenn Logan has offered a helpful Comment of the Day which analyzes Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s defiant and telling op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Glenn is one of many experienced bloggers in the Ethics Alarms commentariat, and at times like these it shows.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?”

***

Steinbach wrote: “Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue.“

True, but only because one side decided the right way to deal with debating controversial issues was to make sure that the other side of the debate could not be heard without wading through repeated ad hominem attacks and invective.

At no point does Steinbach recognize that the students were driving the lack of civility. It is also true that the judge’s remarks at certain points crossed the line, but he was under constant attack to the point that he was unable to deliver a coherent presentation. Steinbach either does not recognize these facts, or is okay with them. Based on her prepared remarks, the latter seems to be the betting favorite.

So how can this possibly square with her implied desire for civil discourse? Easy — discourse can only be civil when it’s hers, or she agrees with it, or it is had on her terms.

Continue reading →

Stanford’s Disgraceful DEI Dean Throws Down The Guntlet…NOW Will Stanford Fire Her?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Well this clarifies things!

Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, currently on well-earned disciplinary leave after her revolting handling of a law student effort to use the “heckler’s veto” to silence a Federal court judge invited to speak to a student group, has decided to challenge the Stanford dean and the school’s president by claiming that she was right to side with the disruptive students. Her defense relies on the currently popular diversity/equity/inclusion cant that free speech can be harmful, and must be “balanced” with DEI objectives.

Her message was relayed in a defiant (and dishonest) op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, ominously titled, “Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford We have to stop blaming, start listening, and ask ourselves: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

The title itself signals Steinbach’s anti-speech point of view. The irritating metaphor “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” in this case means “Is freedom of speech worth the trouble?” That’s the calling card of an aspiring ideological censor and a totalitarian, giving off the stench of “safe spaces” and criminalized hate speech. She, and the op-ed that follows, advocates suppressing opinions and speech that she disagrees with, or in the world of the woke, that is “dangerous” and “wrong,” “wrong” meaning “not what we want to hear.”

First, however, Steinbach had to frame her argument in a lie. She describes the confrontation between Judge Duncan and an organized mob of protesters as merely a “heated exchange,” and “a verbal sparring match,” writing that “some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments” which the judge “answered in turn.” There is video of the event, and that’s not what was going on. Duncan was prevented from giving his prepared remarks, the students who came to hear them were prevented from doing so, and Duncan, far from answering questions, was reduced to calling out the students for their atrocious behavior.

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On The Stanford Students’ Abuse Of Judge Duncan [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

I suppose on the plus side the recent debacle at Stanford Law School might make graduates of Yale Law School, Harvard and Georgetown Law Center feel a bit better about the utter ethics rot that has infected their alma mater. That’s really extreme “glass half full” reasoning, however. This past week, the Stanford Law Federalist Society hosted Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at an event during which he was scheduled to speak about law and judging on the Fifth Circuit Appellate Court, discussing “controversial cases handled by the Fifth Circuit that present difficult issues because the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on them is in flux,” and taking questions from students afterwards. But mob of students set out to harass and insult him so that he could not speak. When Tirien Steinbach, Stanford’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, took the podium to supposedly urge the students to respect the right of speakers to represent views they object to and the right of fellow students to hear them, she sided with demonstrators.

It is undeniable that an increasing number of our most elite educational institutions seek to “educate’ students in the methods and ideology of anti-democracy, endorsing and encouraging the use of tactics that intimidate speakers and prevent the free advocacy of ideas as well as the unimpeded expression of thoughts and opinions. That this is occurring at elite law schools ought to set ethics alarms ringing, as well as liberal culture survival alarms.

I know this is no surprise, but the New York Times has not deemed the episode worthy of reporting to its readers.

Here is a nine-minute video that will give you a sense of what occurred. The flashing neon orange warning light is Steinbach. When she should have stepped in and made it clear that the conduct of the students was unconscionable, an embarrassment to Stanford, and breach of academic freedom and the principles of free speech, she chose instead to throw metaphorical kerosene on the fire. Over at Powerline, Stephen Hayward writes,

If Stanford law school genuinely cares about free speech, Tirien Steinbach should soon be looking for another job. … there were five law school administrators present who [also]did nothing. They should be summarily dismissed, too.

I concur. We shall see, but holding one’s breath in anticipation of this result would be perilous.

The most thorough description of what transpired is here, on David Lat’s substack, in a detailed essay titled “Yale Law Is No Longer #1—For Free-Speech Debacles: Congratulations, Stanford Law, you’re the new poster child for intolerance.” Lat’s reporting makes it very clear that this conclusion is warranted. Lat, incidentally, is a reliably progressive legal commentator who has been embarrassed by the mutation of his creation, “Above the Law,” into an anti-free expression, anti-American nest of far-Left propagandists like Elie Mystal. His condemnation of Stanford’s handling of the debacle is being widely quoted, and because he is far from a conservative shill, is having an impact.

Imagine if someone like Lat had been entrusted with the January 6 riot footage instead of established Fox News conservative ideologue Tucker Carlson. Yeah, yeah, I digress, but those defending McCarthy’s decision are suffering from tunnel vision.

Back to the topic at hand:

Continue reading →

An Unethical Ethics Conference

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

The Fourth International Legal Ethics Conference at Stanford Law School has lined up  over 100 speakers. It is giving them no honorarium, hotel, meals or travel expenses, and despite the fact that they are providing the content and attraction for the event, the Conference still requires them to pay  registration fee of $350. Stanford is also charging its students a registration fee to attend, generously reduced to “only” $250.  But the conference can afford to be so generous, because it will also be getting registration fees from lawyers who are required to fulfill bar-mandated Continuing Legal Education requirements.

I have argued, and behavioral science suggests, that thinking about ethics helps one’s ethics alarms work well and often. The Stanford Conference suggests that either this is not as certain as I believed, or that the people running the ethics conference don’t actually think about ethics, which, if true, adds fraud to their list of ethical outrages.

The unfair and irresponsible requirements of the Stanford event has prompted least one prominent legal ethicist, Prof Monroe Freedman, to abandon plans to attend, saying, “I’m a card-carrying capitalist, but this kind of exploitation in the name of ethics could turn me into a Marxist, or a cynic.”

We should be concerned about a culture whose those in the ethics business are increasingly unethical. The sad lesson seems to be that when there is a conflict between commerce and ethics, commerce wins.