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).
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.”
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:
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....
1/ I realize folks aren't coming to me for theater recs, but I saw Paula Vogel's "Mother Play" at @2STNYC last night, and I was blown away. Bring tissues if you tend to cry during powerful works of theater.
2/ I asked @BerkeleyLaw Dean Erwin Chemerinsky whether he and Professor Catherine Fisk would be seeking discipline against Malak Afaneh and the protesters.
Dean Chemerinsky said they're not sure—but if they do, it will be confidential, per law (e.g., FERPA).
3/ Was Dean Chemerinsky's house subject to the 1st Amendment?
As he told the @LATimes, it's a privately owned home, owned by him and Professor Fisk; it's "not owned by the university, on university property, or in any way paid for by the university."
2/ On the one hand, Judge Cannon kinda walks back some of her prior crazytown order:
The Espionage Act counts "make no reference to the Presidential Records Act, nor do they rely on that statute for purposes of stating an offense."
Ding ding ding!
3/ On the other hand, as @emptywheel notes, Judge Cannon reserves the right to "do something whack with jury instructions"—i.e., instruct on his nutty Presidential Records Act (PRA) theory.
AFTER the jury has been sworn and jeopardy has attached.
1/ 🧵Judge Allison Burroughs (D. Mass.) said it was "greedy" of @JeannieSGersen to push for greater disclosure of sealed portions of the trial-court record in the @Harvard affirmative-action case.
2/ But as @JeannieSGersen writes in her @NewYorker piece, "it is not greedy for the public to expect the transparency on which the courts’ legitimacy depends."
3/ The need for greater transparency applies to both the judicial proceedings in the Harvard case and the underlying admissions process at issue in the litigation (now before #SCOTUS).