Law schools ablaze

Starting with William F. Buckley’s publication of God and Man at Yale (1951), conservatives have loved a good lament about liberal domination of higher education. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Victor Davis Hanson et al.’s Bonfire of the Humanities (2001), and—of particular interest to WORLD readers—James Tunstead Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light (1998), among many others, all decry the decline and fall of America’s universities. Ilya Shapiro has lived that reality himself after a highly public parting of ways with Georgetown University Law Center, and he has now given us an explanation and explication with Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (Broadside Books, 272 pp.).

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites Ilya Shapiro

His diagnosis is bleak even as his pen is light: “It’s now essentially impossible to become a law professor, especially in ‘public law’ areas such as constitutional and criminal law, if you’re to the right of Bernie Sanders.” He was hired by Georgetown only thanks to a specific center focused on constitutional originalism. After his acceptance but before his start date, he sent an unartfully worded tweet about racial bias in judicial selection, which cued the woke mob to descend upon him.

Shapiro’s book is partly a personal memoir of that experience: When his start date arrived, he was immediately placed on administrative leave. “There’s a difference between an investigation and an inquisition,” he writes, having endured the latter. Georgetown was caught between its official policy (protecting academic freedom) and the demands of many students and faculty (who wanted Shapiro canned). He was let off on a technicality but chose resignation when Georgetown made clear he’d have to censor his views to stay.

Shapiro uses his experience as a launching pad to discuss the wider rot within legal academia and to share similar stories of cancellations at other top law schools, like Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner at Yale and Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford.

Walter Olson plowed much of the same ground barely a decade ago in Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America (2011). But things seem different even since then. The legal academy, as with universities overall, has always been overtly liberal. Shapiro credits the change to the explosion of university bureaucracies—the full-time DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) cops who now patrol the halls looking to punish wrongthink. I don’t doubt that’s a contributing factor, but I think it reflects a deeper disease.

Liberalism itself has changed in the past decade. The civil-liberties liberals of yesteryear, the hippies and Vietnam protesters, are gone, retired. They have been replaced by a hardcore corps of committed activists who are soaked in intersectional identity politics and believe that canceling conservatives is a moral duty. Thus, the “classical pedagogical model of legal education,” which made room for the occasional conservative student citing Scalia, has given way to “the postmodern activist one,” where students shout down anyone who is allegedly misogynistic, bigoted, homophobic, transphobic, or pro-Israel.

Shapiro’s book matters to an audience beyond lawyers because the quality of the legal profession matters to the nation at large. An epidemic of idiocy among professors of engineering or dentistry affects our communal quality of life only so much. By contrast, “law schools train future lawyers and politicians and judges, who are the gatekeepers of our institutions and of the rules of the game on which American prosperity, liberty, and equality sit.”

There are bright spots among institutions (Notre Dame, Brigham Young, George Mason) and at small clusters of excellence within institutions (often centered on the faculty adviser to the Federalist Society chapter). For everywhere else, Shapiro reminds us that the renewal of legal education must start with a recommitment to modeling the adversarial testing of truth, which is at the core of the American system of justice.