1/ THREAD. I have appended an update/correction to my Original Jurisdiction post from yesterday about the March 10 protest at Yale Law School.
The disruption was much worse than I originally reported. Here's the text of my update on @YaleLawSch.
2/ It wasn't just the event that was disrupted.
Classes were disrupted too, including Federal Courts (Judith Resnik) and Advanced Legal Writing (Rob Harrison).
The latter was in Room 121—the room farthest away from Room 127, where the event took place.
3/ Students in Federal Courts, across the hall from the event, reported that "the floor was shaking" and Professor Resnik asked on-call students to "yell" so they could be heard over the din.
4/ A student in a classroom who was taking a test on an entirely different floor of the building could even hear the noise from the protest.
In other words, it wasn't just limited to the first floor.
5/ The protesters did block the main hallway of YLS, at least for a time. See photo:
6/ A faculty meeting—the job talk of Professor Claudia Flores, a Latinx legal scholar whose work focuses on international human rights and inequality—was disrupted.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to restart it, the meeting had to be moved to Zoom.
7/ In my opinion, the YLS protesters should apologize to Professor Flores, whose job talk was collateral damage for their rowdy and rude protest.
(I suspect that many of them would support having a Latinx professor of human rights law on the faculty.)
8/ In the room for Professor Flores's job talk was @YaleLawSch Dean Heather Gerken.
Attendees kept looking at @GerkenHeather, expecting her to go out and say something to the protesters—but she did nothing.
9/ Yes, I know, the dynamic duo of Dean of Students Ellen Cosgrove & DEI Director Yaseen Eldik were on the scene.
But having Dean Gerken herself come out to confront the protesters would have been far more powerful—& might have succeeded in quieting them.
10/ For anyone who missed it, here's the link to my story from yesterday about the unfortunate events at Yale Law School (which I am going to update now with the addition of this Twitter thread).
bit.ly/3JlPa1Q
11/ So based on what I've learned, I think @aaronsibarium's account of the YLS protest for @FreeBeacon is far more accurate than that of Eda Aker and @PhilipMousaviz1 for @yaledailynews.
The protest was highly disruptive, and it lasted for quite some time.
12/ Here’s the account of someone in the room at the Yale Law School protest: @JimmyByrn reports that he “could hear virtually none of it the entire time.”
13/ There are a bunch of dueling audio/video recordings from @mjs_DC at @Slate, @ADFLegal, and @aaronsibarium of the @FreeBeacon.
I'm going to post them all in this thread.
14/ This @Slate post by @mjs_DC has 2 clips.
The first is like the original @FreeBeacon one. We all agree it's rowdy.
In the second, @KWaggonerADF is audible—but not very, even though it's from the 2nd row. And it's 15 seconds.
bit.ly/3N2nC3N
15/ Here is the first of five YLS clips from @ADFLegal. In all of them, the crowd is loud and rowdy. But like the @Slate clip, they're also short—and therefore open to the criticism that they were cherry-picked.
1 of 5:
16/ Audio of the Yale Law School event from @ADFLegal, 2 of 5:
17/ Audio of the Yale Law School event from @ADFLegal, 3 of 5:
18/ Audio of the Yale Law School event from @ADFLegal, 4 of 5:
19/ Audio of the Yale Law School event from @ADFLegal, 5 of 5:
20/ I think the latest by @aaronsibarium & @FreeBeacon has the most comprehensive audio—23+ minutes, so more representative than either @Slate or @ADFLegal.
I find it often hard to hear (but, full disclosure, I have poor hearing).
bit.ly/3KQxN9E
21/ One other thing to note:
The various recordings, from @mjs_DC @Slate @ADFLegal @aaronsibarium @FreeBeacon, are all from INSIDE Room 127, where the protest took place.
Remember that the protesters then went into the hallway (until some returned for Q&A).
22/ The problems that I started this thread with—the disrupted classes, the faculty/meeting job talk that had to be rescheduled, etc.—flowed from the protesters being loud in the hallway.
The in-room recordings are less helpful in assessing that disruption.
23/ To everyone giving me grief about the "Latinx" mention in tweet #6 above, I think it should be clear from this thread (and all of my other writing) that I'm not exactly Mr. Woke....
Here's the explanation:
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