Lawless I: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education
Thanks to Eugene for inviting me to participate in the Volokh Conspiracy’s venerable tradition of the author’s weeklong guest-blog. I’m particularly excited for the opportunity not only to preview my new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites, but to dispel some Ilya Confusion. Then again, it may also make Ilya Confusion harder to discern, because the most common way I recognize interlocutors who are thinking of “the other Ilya” (Somin) is when they reference my blogging on this site. Well, now we’re both VC bloggers.
In any event, my new book Lawless uses my “lived experience”—what one friend called “the Troubles”—as a jumping-off point for diving into the illiberal takeover of law schools and the legal profession. It discusses failures in (1) bureaucracy, (2) ideology, and (3) leadership, and (4) proposes reforms. My remaining posts will cover each of those numbered items.
VC readers no doubt know my story. When I accepted Randy Barnett’s offer to become executive director of Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, I thought it would be a chance to have a different kind of impact on public affairs. After nearly 15 years at the Cato Institute, having become a vice president and published a critically acclaimed book on the Supreme Court, I was looking for a new challenge. Well, that’s what I got, but not quite how I’d imagined it.
In late January 2022, when news of Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement broke, I tweeted in opposition to President Biden’s decision to limit his nominee pool by race and sex. I argued that Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit—who also happens to be an Indian-American immigrant—was the best candidate for a Democratic president, meaning that everyone else was less qualified. So if Biden kept his promise, he would pick what, given Twitter’s character limit, I characterized as a “lesser black woman.” Then I went to bed.
Overnight, a fire storm erupted on social media. I deleted the tweet and apologized for my inartful choice of words, but stood by my view that Biden should’ve considered “all possible nominees,” as 76% of Americans agreed in a poll by that right-wing outlet ABC News. (I stand by that view to this day.) But it was too late. My ideological opponents were out for blood, or at least my new job—even before I was due to assume it on February 1.
That day, January 27, was the second-worst day of my l
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