WTH is Going On with Law School Wokeness? Ilya Shapiro on the Dangers of DEI for the Rule Of Law

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, History, Government, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2023

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Not only is DEI hiring creating bureaucracy bloat in higher education country-wide, it is beginning to fundamentally alter our institutions. One place where the erosion of excellence is already apparent? Our legal institutions – just last year, 12 Federal Judges boycotted hiring clerks from Yale Law School (some of the crème de la crème of legal education) due to the aspiring lawyers’ inability to practice good faith, unbiased law. And no wonder: The Federalist Society at Stanford Law School hosted Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals – he was shouted down by a group of students. Our guest Ilya Shapiro was nearly fired for tweeting about Biden’s Supreme Court nominations. We are, as a nation, beginning to forget… this is a representative democracy. We are not governed by a mob. Free speech is a foundational tenet of the Constitution that defines this country and its institutions. College sophomoric groupthink on social issues is one thing; but the next generation of Supreme Court prosecutors already radicalized enough that they are being barred by current sitting judges? That’s quite another problem.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, and before that a vice president of the Cato Institute, director of Cato’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, and publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review. Shapiro is the author of Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court.

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.0	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on?
0:01.1	Who in God's name knows what it's all about.
0:34.9	Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
0:36.7	And I'm Mark Dyson.
0:41.3	Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Mark,
0:46.7	what the hell is going on now? What we're talking about is what the hell is going on with law school wokeness? So we were all outraged recently when we saw this incident at Stanford Law School where
0:53.8	the Federalist Society
0:55.2	Chapter invited a judge named Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to come to speak
1:00.8	on campus.
1:01.7	And he was just assaulted and shouted down by a group of woke students.
1:08.5	And then the dean for DEI, who was present, joined in, basically. They were
1:15.7	shouting him out. They said that somebody told him, they hoped that his daughters were raped. And she said,
1:20.7	as I look out, I don't ask what's going on here. I look out and I say, I'm glad this is going on
1:25.5	here. I mean, good God, this is one of the most elite
1:29.0	institutions in the country, the legal institutions. These are the future lawyers that are going to be
1:34.4	clerking for judges, well, probably not anymore, but, you know, are going to be leading our legal
1:38.7	profession and, you know, they're acting like, you know, college sophomores. It's shocking. To me, this is
1:45.7	more than shocking. This is more than disturbing. This is frightening. And that I think is the problem
1:53.5	that we all face is that it's not so much that this is an ardent disagreement with people on one side or the other using
2:03.8	intemperate or inappropriate language. It is that people are being terrorized and bullied
2:11.6	into silence, afraid to speak their convictions, afraid to talk about what they believe in, that undermines the very
	...

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