Mob Rule and Cancel Culture at Hastings Law School Will the woke students who screamed obscenities and physically confronted me face any discipline? By Ilya Shapiro
I’ve given more than 1,000 speeches in my career, and I’d never been protested—until March 1, when dozens of students shut down my event at San Francisco’s UC Hastings College of the Law. In January the school’s Federalist Society chapter invited me to talk about my recent book on the politics of judicial nominations, a subject that became timelier with Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement.
On Jan. 26 I tweeted in opposition to President Biden’s decision to limit his nominee pool by race and sex. I argued that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the best candidate, meaning that everyone else was less qualified, so if Mr. Biden kept his promise, he would pick what, given Twitter’s character limit, I characterized as a “lesser black woman.” I deleted the tweet and apologized for my inartful choice of words, but I stand by my view that Mr. Biden should have considered “all possible nominees,” as 76% of Americans agreed in an ABC News poll.
I was about to start a new job as a senior lecturer at Georgetown and executive director of its law school’s Center for the Constitution. Georgetown placed me on paid leave pending an investigation into whether I violated any university policy. I can’t comment on that investigation because eight weeks later it’s still in process.
It’s clear that a vocal minority of Hastings students wanted to hear neither my reasoning about Mr. Biden’s selection criteria nor my broader analysis now that there is a nominee. They screamed obscenities and physically confronted me, several times getting in my face or blocking my access to the lectern, and they shouted down a dean.
They also castigated their school for allowing me to speak and circulated a letter demanding “a committee of diverse student representatives” to approve speakers as well as mandatory training in critical race theory for students and faculty. Never mind that Hastings, a public institution, would be violating the First Amendment if it disapproved speakers based on their viewpoints.
And never mind that preventing a duly invited speaker from speaking is against UC Hastings’s rules. The school’s chancellor wrote in a communitywide email the next day: “Disrupting an event to prevent a speaker from being heard is a violation of our policies and norms . . . which the College will—indeed, must—enforce.”
But don’t hold your breath for anybody to be disciplined there or at Yale Law School, where an event was similarly disrupted the next week. Too few administrators follow the example of the University of Chicago’s Robert Zimmer. In response to pressure to punish Prof. Dorian Abbot for criticizing affirmative action, Mr. Zimmer reaffirmed his commitment to faculty members’ freedom to “disagree with any policy or approach of the University . . . without being subject to discipline, reprimand or other form of punishment.”
You’d think that law students should have a particular appreciation for spirited and open engagement with provocative ideas. They’ve chosen a career that centers on argument and persuasion.
But alas a heckler’s veto prevailed. I’d welcome the opportunity to return to Hastings—or anywhere—to discuss the Supreme Court. It’s even more important to have a national reckoning about our inability to discuss controversial issues without canceling our opponents.
Mr. Shapiro is author of “Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court.”
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