David Lat on the Latest Yale Law School Disruption of a Speaker
A superb analysis, at his Original Jurisdiction newsletter. Read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
Here’s a report from Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon:
More than 100 students at Yale Law School attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, intimidating attendees and causing so much chaos that police were eventually called to escort panelists out of the building.
The March 10 panel, which was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association (AHA) and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative nonprofit that promotes religious liberty. Both groups had taken the same side in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations. The purpose of the panel, a member of the Federalist Society said, was to illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues.
For additional coverage, see … Eda Aker and Philip Mousavizadeh’s article in the Yale Daily News and Robby Soave’s post over at Reason.
If you read the Free Beacon’s coverage, you get the sense of an out-of-control mob; if you read the YDN’s coverage, you get the sense of quiet, non-disruptive protesters, threatened by the presence of police. Based on what I’ve heard from folks who were there, the truth lies somewhere in between.
The protesters were disruptive at the start of the event, both inside the classroom and after they repaired to the hallway. But unlike the protesters at Hastings, they did calm down (eventually), and they did not succeed in “canceling” the Yale event, which moved forward to completion.
Credit for this should go to Professor Kate Stith, moderator of the Yale FedSoc event, who had the unenviable task of dealing with this fraught situation. As you can see in video footage (via the Free Beacon), after the protesters started getting noisy inside the classroom, claiming that this was their form of “free speech,” she reminded them of the school’s actual free-speech policies (and told them that they needed t
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