UC Hastings Law Students Silence Conservative Speaker, Demand Anti-Racism Training

University of California, Hastings College of the Law is in San Francisco, California. Its most famous alumnus is Vice President Kamala Harris.

Earlier this week, UC Hastings hosted what was supposed to be a discussion between two professors on the opportunities afforded by Associate Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s recent vacancy. The college’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, organized the event, which featured Rory Little, a UC Hastings law professor representing the liberal viewpoint, and Ilya Shapiro, executive director of Georgetown University’s Constitution Center, representing the libertarian right.

The discussion did not take place. Several dozen student protesters affiliated with the campus’s Black Law Students Association (BLSA) drowned out Shapiro whenever he tried to speak, interrupting the event for its entire planned hour. Administrators’ repeated pleas to let the discussion proceed were ignored by the activists, who chanted “Black Lives Matter” over and over again until Shapiro eventually gave up.

The students had deemed Shapiro an illegitimate speaker due to controversial comments he made a little more than a month ago about President Joe Biden’s commitment to nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court. In late January, Shapiro tweeted that he believed Biden’s pledge to nominate at least in part based on race and gender would preclude him from selecting the most qualified liberal jurist, Sri Srinivasan. He used the unfortunate phrase “lesser black woman” to describe a theoretical Biden pick; Shapiro later clarified that he did not mean to suggest black women were in any way lesser, but rather that Srinivasan—an Indian man—was the most qualified progressive judge of all.

“I regret my poor choice of words, which undermine my message that no one should be discriminated against for his or her gender or skin color,” he told Reason at the time.

Shapiro made a full apology to everyone hurt by his regrettable phrasing. But Georgetown opted to place him on leave pending an investigation. (It had b