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Last week, Judge James Ho took a bold stance against the “woke mob” oppressing conservative students at Yale Law School by declaring that he’s no longer hiring conservative students from Yale Law School. That might seem counter-productive, but remember that James Ho is considered a potential future conservative Supreme Court pick and he realized that conservative media wasn’t talking about him for 20 seconds so he tossed some red meat to the fringe outlets by picking on Yale Law.
Yale Law became the avatar for conservative grumbling largely on the back of the Washington Free Beacon’s commitment to convert every New Haven molehill into a mountain, hyping every rule-abiding protest as if speakers barely ducked Molotov cocktails and placing a student group scolded over a racial stereotype parties on a pedestal between Mandela and Solzhenitsyn. Yale isn’t uniquely more liberal than any other institution that skews toward smart, academically gifted people, but it’s the Horcrux these people have chosen to bear the weight of a collapsing star’s worth of their whinging grievances.
I mean… tell me you only have sources at one law school without telling me you only have sources at one law school, right?
Ho called on other judges to join his boycott, probably expected no one to take him up on it because compromising the careers of stellar young conservatives just to spite the non-conservatives they go to school with doesn’t make any sense. The only Yale Law grads that would ever apply to work with Ho would be the go-getter legacies hoping to climb the cursus MAGArum of the conservative legal movement, so who really gets hurt here?
Not Yale Law School. That its handful of conservative graduates are all but guaranteed clerkships in a federal judiciary massively overpopulated with right-wing acolytes compared to the rest of the population, the rest of their grads are still going to get these positions. Yale’s representation on the Supreme Court might dip as the conservative majority loses Yale grads coming up through feeder judges, but US News doesn’t care. Frankly, only the Above the Law rankings put thumbs on the scale for SCOTUS clerking and Yale Law is already out of the top 10 in that ranking anyway.
Josh Blackman took a different angle and suggested that the proposal provides a means of distilling ideological purity:
How, then, should a judge assess a conservative applicant who chooses to go to Yale? This person knowingly walked into the traphouse for the sake of an elite degree. I think it is reasonable for a judge to conclude that the applicant exercised poor professional judgment.
Why? Poor professional judgment to attend a law school that, until last week, all but guaranteed them a clerkship? And what does it matter that the student went to a school with more liberals than conservatives anyway? Putting aside that this describes almost every law school, Blackman questions anyone who would go in “knowing how inhospitable Yale is to conservatives.” It’s poor judgment to go to a school because other students might challenge you? Not a lot of “courage of convictions” around these parts, huh?
Blackman continues:
I do not know if any YLS students actually transferred out.
Yeah, no shit.
But despite it all, according to the WFB, a dozen federal judges have signed onto this dubious plan! Who are these life-tenured very stable geniuses?
The judges joining the boycott, all of whom requested anonymity in order to speak freely, cited a series of incidents where they say free speech has come under attack at Yale Law…
Ah.
No one is willing to put up or shut up, huh? Because a “pressure campaign” doesn’t really work when no one is willing to go on the record. Of course, going on the record would just allow us all to point and laugh at the prospect that some third-tier ABA non-qualified judge was ever getting a Yale clerk in the first place. This is like a 14-year-old boy announcing they’ve sworn off dating models.
Or perhaps these other judges have considered this analysis from the National Law Journal:
Legal ethics adviser and University of Miami Law professor Jan Jacobowitz said comments from Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit criticizing Yale could create recusal problems in the future….
Calling Ho’s refusal to work with Yale grads because of the incident “irony 2.0,” Jacobowitz said future Yale Law graduates who go before Ho for hearings could fear the judge is biased against them.
“Any party who retains a Yale law school graduate or happens to be a Yale graduate might reasonably believe that they would get a fair trial in the judge’s courtroom,” she explained.
Which actually makes this worse. If these judges hate Yale Law grads but refuse to be open about it, that supercharges the ethical problems.
All to throw a private tantrum against an institution that produces maybe 25 conservative graduates a year? That’s probably generous. And that’s the real reason they direct all this caterwauling at Yale. Harvard is just as ideologically skewed but its classes are more than double Yale’s.
Nothing makes for a more principled stand than a boycott designed to inconvenience you the least.
Earlier: James Ho Cancel Cultures Yale Law FedSoc Because Other Students Are Mean To Yale Law FedSoc Students
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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