Aaron Sibarium Profile picture
Mar 14, 2023 17 tweets 3 min read Read on X
NEW: Hundreds of Stanford students lined the halls yesterday to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Kyle Duncan, the judge shouted down last week.

The students effectively subjected Martinez to an intimidating walk of shame.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/student…
Martinez arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech. ImageImage
"We, the students in your constitutional law class, are sorry for exercising our 1st Amendment rights," some fliers read. As a private law school, Stanford is not bound by the First Amendment.
When Martinez’s class adjourned, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read "counter-speech is free speech," stared silently at Martinez as she exited the room, according to five students who witnessed the episode.
The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school. And the majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 students out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves.
The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame.

"They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black" and join the crowd, said Luke Schumacher, a first-year law student in Martinez’s class.
"It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating."

Another student in the class, who likewise declined to protest, said the spectacle was a surreal experience.
"It was eerie," the student said. "The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean." 

Ironically, the student added, "this form of protest would have been completely fine" at Duncan’s talk on Thursday.
This protest was even larger than the one that disrupted Duncan’s talk, and came on the heels of statements from at least three student groups rebuking Martinez’s apology.
The Stanford National Lawyers Guild said Saturday that Martinez had thrown "capable and compassionate administrators" under the bus. Stanford’s immigration law group issued a similar declaration Sunday, writing that Martinez’s apology to Duncan "only made this situation worse."
And Stanford Law School’s chapter of the American Constitution Society expressed outrage that Martinez and Tessier-Lavigne had framed Duncan "as a victim, when in fact he himself had made civil dialogue impossible."
The groups argued that the students who disrupted Duncan, in violation of Stanford’s free speech policies, were merely exercising their own free speech rights. That idea appears to be shared by Tirien Steinbach, the diversity dean who harangued Duncan.
In a conversation with students after the event, Steinbach claimed the hecklers hadn’t violated any law school policies, according to two people who witnessed the conversation.
She also alleged that Duncan hadn’t prepared a speech—a claim contradicted by video of the judge holding pages of pre-written remarks—and that he was a serial provocateur, belittling law students everywhere he's spoken in order to rile them up for the cameras.
Steinbach, who did not respond to a request for comment, laid the blame for the chaos entirely at Duncan’s feet, the people who witnessed the conversation said.
Martinez said at the start of her class that she had received a number of emails complaining about her apology to Duncan—which was co-signed by the president of Stanford—but told students they would not be litigating that dispute during Monday’s class.
After Martinez left the building, Schumacher said, the protesters began to cheer, cry, and hug. "We are creating a hostile environment at this law school," Schumacher said—"hostile for anyone who thinks an Article III judge should be able to speak without heckling."

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More from @aaronsibarium

Jul 28
EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration has launched a civil rights probe into the Duke Law Journal based on our reporting—and it's warning that Duke Medical School could be next.

The school could lose ~1 billion in federal aid if it does not make major changes within six months.🧵 Image
The Department of Education will investigate the Duke Law Journal’s 2024 decision to award extra points to applicants who mentioned race and gender in their personal statements.
Candidates could earn up to 10 points for discussing their "membership in an underrepresented group," according to the grading rubric for the essays, and an additional 3-5 points for holding "a leadership position in an affinity group." Image
Read 7 tweets
Jul 17
NEW: After Prop. 209, UC San Diego transferred a race-based scholarship to a private nonprofit, the San Diego Foundation, so that it could continue the program.

Now both entities are being sued under the KKK Act, which bans conspiracies to interfere with civil rights.🧵 Image
The Ku Klux Klan Act bans conspiracies of both public and private actors that deprive "any person … of the equal protection of the laws." It was passed in 1871 to counter the Klan’s lawless intimidation of black voters.
But it is being used today to challenge UCSD’s Black Alumni Scholarship Fund, which a lawsuit filed on Wednesday describes as a "conspiracy to interfere with civil rights."
Read 17 tweets
Jul 1
EXCLUSIVE: Before she became the acting president of Columbia University, Claire Shipman argued that the school needed to get an "Arab on our board"—and suggested that a Jewish trustee should be removed over her pro-Israel advocacy.🧵 Image
"We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board," Shipman, then the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, wrote in a message on January 17, 2024. "Quickly I think. Somehow." Image
A week later, Shipman told a colleague that Shoshana Shendelman, one of the board’s most outspoken critics of campus anti-Semitism, had been "extraordinarily unhelpful," adding, "I just don’t think she should be on the board." Image
Read 11 tweets
Jun 30
SCOOP: The Duke Law Journal sent a secret memo to minority applicants with tips on how to ace the journal's personal statement.

The memo told students they'd get up to 15 extra points for indicating their "membership in an "underrepresented group."🧵 Image
Image
The packet also included four examples of successful personal statements. Three of those essays referenced race in the first sentence. For example: "as an Asian-American woman and a daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges." Image
A fourth student waited until the last paragraph to disclose that she was "a Middle Eastern Jewish woman," an "intersectional identity" she said would "prove useful" in a "collaborative environment." Image
Read 18 tweets
Jun 19
NEW: The Harvard Law Review axes 85% of pieces using a rubric that asks about "author diversity." It even axed a piece by an Asian scholar after editors complained that there were "not enough Black" authors.

We analyzed 500 new documents from HLR. What we found was shocking.🧵 Image
The law review has insisted that it "does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication."

But it screens out the vast majority of submissions using the following rubric: Image
40% of editors since 2024 have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained that "we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors."
Read 49 tweets
Jun 6
NEW: The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student for allegedly leaking documents to yours truly—and demanded he request their destruction in the midst of three federal probes.

Now the journal is being accused of illegally interfering with a government investigation.🧵 Image
The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 it was investigating reports of race discrimination at the journal. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the DOJ investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.
The journal told Wasserman to "[r]equest that any parties with whom you have shared Confidential Materials … delete or return them to The Review."
Read 22 tweets

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