Stanford law students treated an invited speaker more like someone from “The Breakfast Club,” neglecting to give honor to a judge, which is expected of students of a prestigious U.S. law school.
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan was heckled, hooted at, shouted down and called a racist by students pursuing a career in law.
He was unable to deliver his prepared remarks Thursday although invited to do so by the school’s Federalist Society chapter.
Social media contains video footage of Stanford’s Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, who sided with protesters. Steinbach spent minutes lecturing the appellate court judge.
When Duncan interrupted her at the beginning of her lengthy diatribe, the same students who refused to let him speak yelled at him, “Let her finish!”
“Your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement” of the students’ rights, Steinbach lectured Duncan. She claimed his rulings affected millions of people by “tearing the fabric of this community.”
When Steinbach wondered aloud whether the juice was worth the squeeze, the judge said he did not understand what she meant.
“Do you have something so incredibly important to say,” she asked him, that it is worth the “division of these people?” In other words, she explained, did he have something so important to share about Twitter, guns or COVID, that it justified what she called the “harm” the students present suffered by his presence.
Watch:
Judge Duncan event at Stanford from Ethics and Public Policy Center on Vimeo.
One reason students reportedly claimed justified their intolerant behavior was Duncan’s refusal to address a transgender sex offender with their preferred pronouns.
Duncan, in an interview with The Washington Free Beacon, demanded Stanford discipline students who disrupted his talk. He also called for the termination of Associate Dean Steinbach for delivering what the judge called “a bizarre therapy session from Hell.”
Federalist Society member Tim Rosenberger claimed at least three other administrators were present during the event, according to the Free Beacon report. Rosenberger named Associate Dean of Student Affairs Jory Steele, Associate Director of Student Affairs Holly Parish and Student Affairs Coordinator Megan Brown as administrators present during the attempted speech. None told students to permit Duncan to speak without interruption, the report noted.
After student hecklers made it clear they would not allow him to deliver his prepared remarks, he was reportedly escorted out a back door by U.S. Marshals.
Stanford Law School’s reputation is almost as good as Yale’s but Thursday’s behavior by Stanford students worried the judge.
“If enough of these kids get into the legal profession,” he said, “the rule of law will descend into barbarism.”
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