The Takeover of America’s Legal System – Common Sense
All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America s law schools. It was mandatory.
Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class on the importance of questioning the law s neutrality and assessing its differential effects on subordinated groups, according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University s Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them.
As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism, both at the start of law school and at least once again before graduation. That s in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to eliminate racism. (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)
Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate and an illegitimate legal order. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse the 17-year-old who killed two men and wounded another during a riot, in Kenosha, Wisconsin was further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system. At UC Irvine, the university s chief diversity officer emailed students that the acquittal conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies matter. (He later apologized for having appeared to call into question a lawful trial verdict. )
Professors say it is harder to lecture about cases in which accused rapists are acquitted, or a police officer is found not guilty of abusing his authority. One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.
I got into this job because I liked to play devil s advocate, said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. I can t do that anymore. I have a family.
Other law professors several of whom asked me not to identify their institution, their area of expertise, or even their state of residence were similarly terrified.
Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School, told me: I massively self-censor. I assume that every single thing that is said, every facial gesture, is going to be recorded and potentially disseminated to the entire world. I feel as if I am operating in a panopticon.
This has all come as a shock to many law professors, who had long assumed that law schools wouldn t cave to the new orthodoxy.
That’s about right, especially Nadine Strossen’s remark about “massive self-censoring.” It’s one thing when small and formerly cute university law schools do it, but something else again when the massively reputed Yale Law School does it. It wears one down, this self-censorship.