Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News
Yale Law School, long considered one of the premier training grounds for aspiring attorneys in the nation and world, will have a slightly harder time finding top placement for recent graduates as two federal judges have pledged to not consider recent Yale alumni for employment.
As first reported by the National Review, Judges James Ho of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and Elizabeth Branch of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have instituted a boycott of Yale Law over what they view as a program run amok in wokeness and cancel culture.
The judges have pledged to not hire Yale graduates for clerkships, one assumes until the school becomes less permissive of students shouting down conservative speakers.
Ho, who was appointed to his position by former President Donald Trump, actually began the boycott in September and, at the time, encouraged other judges to join him.
“I don’t want to cancel Yale. I want Yale to stop canceling people like me,” Ho said during a speech titled “Agreeing to Disagree — Restoring America by Resisting Cancel Culture,” which he gave at a Federalist Society conference in Kentucky.
The Federalist Society is a conservative and libertarian legal organization that has as a core value the tenet that the Constitution should be interpreted using a traditionalist approach.
Branch, also a Trump appointee, has joined Ho citing “legitimate concerns about the lack of free speech on law school campuses, Yale in particular.”
“Like Judge Ho, I am gravely concerned that the stifling of debate not only is antithetical to this country’s founding principles, but also stunts intellectual growth,” Branch told National Review. “Accordingly, I accept Judge Ho’s invitation to join him in declining to consider students from Yale Law School for clerkships with me, with an exception for past and current students.”
The root of Ho’s complaint is that Yale students have engaged in what online culture warriors have referred to as a “heckler’s veto” when conservative speakers have been on campus.
A heckler’s veto, legally speaking, involves a government restricting someone’s speech through the use of public safety laws or expected negative reactions as a means of silencing speakers.
However, the term has grown to be a colloquial shorthand for any occurrence during which a speaker is silenced by means of being shouted down or disrupted by unruly audience members. Sometimes, the phrase is used to describe what has occurred when university officials cancel or heavily restrict a speaker by using the same public safety rationale as nefarious governmental players use in the classic, legal example of the heckler’s veto.
Ho has cited a pair of instances at Yale that he feels are indicative of a campus where “cancellations and disruptions seem to occur with special frequency.”
Kristen Waggoner, an attorney who represented the Colorado baker who refuses to create cakes for gay weddings, was interrupted by students during a speech earlier this year while Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals experienced similar disruptions a year ago.
The 5th Circuit is based in New Orleans while the 11th is based in Atlanta.