RUTHFULLY YOURS

But are the “values” of Sullivan & Cromwell the same as the “values” of Kirkland & Ellis, or of the University of Pennsylvania? Is there nothing in the distinct character of these institutions that can produce a moral response with edge and substance? The term “value judgment” came to us through Nietzsche and Max Weber, when people lost their confidence in speaking of moral truths and began to speak rather of the things they happened to “value,” which may not be what others “value.”

It was hardly controversial for the law firms to denounce “hatred or bigotry.” But what is it exactly that the law firms are enjoining the universities to do? The firms would doubtless assure the schools that they are against interfering with the freedom of the demonstrators to assemble and to speak.

For their own part, the students would assert that there is nothing anti-Semitic in their critique. What they are condemning, they say, is the “suffocating occupation of the Palestinian people.” At that point the law firms would have to step away from the woolly affirmation of “values” to challenge the demonstrators on the substance of their claims. They would have to ask questions like these:

If Hamas is engaged in “resistance,” what is the wrong that the students think finds an apt and proportionate response in the kidnapping of grandmothers and the beheading of children?

The protesters inveigh against an Israeli “occupation” and the imposition of colonial “imperialism.” That has the moral resonance of charging that people are being ruled without their consent, without free elections. But Palestinians are governed by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority without free elections. Why aren’t they seeking to overthrow those regimes?

What do the protesters mean by “occupation”? There’s a confusion between the term’s military sense and the simple sense in which Jews “occupy,” or live in, Israel. Hamas’s objective evidently is to remove them from that land—or from the land of the living.

Is there a legal dispute over who has a right to govern this territory? That would bring accounts surprising to many people of who settled and developed the different parts of Palestine first. That is a dispute that lends itself to evidence presented in a forum that would be trusted to sift through the facts and form a judgment.

But that isn’t the point being made in a brutal armed assault. An assault brings no “brief” or argument; it carries its own meaning as an appeal to brute force. If that sets the terms of the engagement, the matter has been placed beyond moral reasoning altogether; it is marked by the principle that might makes right. That the Israelis have borne the sacrifices and fought successfully to preserve their independence in three major wars now may be quite enough to show, on these terms, that they have paid the price to live in this territory they have developed and won.

However the argument is played out, these are the lines on which it is most likely to run in any serious challenge. That it isn’t taking place now in the most prestigious colleges reflects what has changed so markedly in colleges that used to take themselves seriously.

But one would think that these reasoned challenges would spring forth from people who have made their vocation in law. A graduate of a law school who hasn’t thought along these lines in explaining his judgments—or a student who begins by not respecting the difference between innocence and guilt—has evidently wandered into the wrong profession. It isn’t that he is unsuited to work at Kirkland & Ellis, but that he is unfit to practice law.

Mr. Arkes is director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding and author of “Mere Natural Law.”