This is the libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I'm your host Tom Church and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard's the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Richard, today I want to ask you about free speech and the future of the legal profession.

This is motivated by a recent curfuffle at Yale Law School, or about a week ago,

the Yale Federal Society hosted an event with participants from the American Humanist Association

and the Alliance defending Freedom, the ADF, two groups that usually don't see eye to eye,

but which collaborated on a Supreme Court case, a religious liberty and freedom

Supreme Court case, which they won 8 to 1. The Federal Society at Yale said, you know, this

event was to illustrate that a liberal

atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues.

Now instead what happened was that about 120 Yale law students protested and disrupted the event because of the participation of the ADF, the Alliance defending freedom, a group whom they do not like.

This is on the heels, of course, of a similar protest you see Hastings law school a couple weeks ago of Ilios Shapiro and Richard what I want to know is how typical is this behavior at law schools now is this the norm it should we be expecting

this from now on I don't think it's the norm but I think that we can expect a

regular set of staccato-like interferences.

One has to put this into perspective.

The Federal Society is an extremely active society.

It has chapters at virtually every major law school

in the country, probably over 150 chapters.

Many of them are relatively energetic.

So what they do is they will put on perhaps as many

as one event every 10 days or one a week or one every other week. So you start adding it up and you try to figure out the ones that sort of go without a hitch, you're probably talking about a thousand plus events a year. And then what you do is you get a couple of outliers in which everything seems to get together in the wrong way.

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