Take note, Stanford Law students. Notre Dame just showed you up in the civility and free speech departments.

Those of you who read this blog will recall the incredibly childish temper tantrum that some precious Stanford Law students put on when Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan attempted to give a speech at Stanford on March 9th. The students immediately started yelling and heckling Judge Duncan before he could even give his remarks, and then the whole event really went off the rails when Stanford’s DEI dean, Tirien Steinbach, decided to give her own little lecture – to Judge Duncan.

Watch: Stanford Law School Associate Dean for DEI, Tirien Angela Steinbach make a fool of herself.

People like Ms. Steinbach are why America’s best and brightest are no longer interested in attending schools like Stanford.
pic.twitter.com/SLT698ZFRM

— Charles R Downs (@TheCharlesDowns) March 11, 2023

Steinbach later doubled down in an op-ed about the chaos that she wrote for the Wall Street Journal. Regardless of Steinbach’s attempt to equivocate, this entire debacle was a huge embarrassment to Stanford Law. And fortunately, there are still some administrators there with a modicum of common sense and a healthy respect for free speech. The Law School’s dean, Jenny Martinez, wrote a ten-page letter in defense of free speech, and giving the Stanford Law students a much-needed wake-up call.

Though she received intense backlash from some students for the apology, Martinez said yesterday she isn’t backing down. In a 10-page statement strongly re-affirming Stanford’s commitment to free expression, Martinez explains in detail how Duncan’s hecklers violated Stanford policy, mapping out how a cooperative relationship between free expression and diversity will need to work, and outlining specific steps to create a better culture for open discourse at the school.”

Importantly, the strong statements in the letter are backed up with specific plans to teach the significance of free expression to Stanford Law students. The law school will hold a “mandatory half-day session” for all students “on the topic of freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.”

Appropriately, students will be “free to disagree” with the session material.”

However, to prevent a similar scenario from unfolding again, Martinez states that “all staff will receive additional training” regarding enforcing university rules pertaining to guarding against and managing event disruptions.”

Essentially, the Stanford Law students are all being sent to a half-day detention to be told exactly where they went wrong, and that they won’t be doing this again. Dean Jenny Martinez has declined to discipline the students, though, but has singled out the failures of DEI Dean Steinbach – who is now “on leave” for her actions – for not getting the situation under control so the event could continue.

One can applaud Dean Martinez for her commitment to free speech, while also applauding Notre Dame. After the Stanford brouhaha, the Notre Dame chapter of the Federalist Society invited Judge Duncan to speak on their campus. Well, to no one’s surprise, Judge Duncan was able to give his speech without interruption this last Friday.

Also to no one’s surprise, the judge gave a talk on free speech.

In his first public appearance since the Stanford melee, Judge Duncan disputed the contention that being jeered and interrupted by about 100 students at his March 9 visit represented a legitimate free speech exercise. He called the raucous protest a “disgrace” and a “parody” of free expression.”

“Let’s say the quiet part out loud: The mob came to target me because they hate my work and my ideas,” Judge Duncan, a Trump appointee, said in his Friday address at Notre Dame’s Center for Citizenship & Constitutional Government.”

“None of this spectacle, this obviously public shaming, had the slightest thing to do with free speech,” he said. “It had everything to do with intimidation. And to be clear, not intimidating me. I’m not intimidated by this. I’m a life-tenured judge. I’m going to go back to my court and keep writing opinions. No, the target of the intimidation was the protesters’ fellow students.”

He praised Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez for her “extraordinary” and “profound” March 22 memo drawing a distinction between free expression and the “heckler’s veto” and outlining the administration’s next steps, including a requirement for students to attend a half-day session on free speech and norms in the legal profession.”

“It is not free speech to silence others because you hate them. It is not free speech to jeer and heckle a speaker who’s been invited to your school so that he can’t deliver a talk,” Judge Duncan said. “It is not free speech to form a mob and hurl taunts and threats that aren’t worthy of being written on the wall of a public toilet. It is not free speech to pretend to be harmed by words or ideas you disagree with, and then use that feigned harm as a license to deny a speaker the most rudimentary forms of civility.”

“Counterspeech means offering a reasoned response to an argument. It doesn’t mean screaming, ‘Shut up, you scum, we hate you’ at a distance of 12 feet,” Judge Duncan said.”

He also dismissed the contention that the students were engaging in the “marketplace of ideas.”

“Again, wrong,” Judge Duncan said. “The marketplace of ideas describes a free and fair competition among opposing arguments with the most compelling one, we hope, emerging on the top. What transpired at Stanford was no marketplace. It was more like a flash mob on a shoplifting spree.”

Other students, specifically those with right-of-center views, were the real targets of the protests, he said.”

“The message could not have been clearer: Woe to you if you represent the kind of client Judge Duncan does, or if you take the same views that he has,” said Judge Duncan, who was ultimately escorted from the Stanford classroom by federal marshals without delivering his lecture.”

Kudos to Notre Dame and their Federalist Society for bringing in Judge Duncan in, and showing Stanford Law how things should be done. And no one at Notre Dame was in the least bit injured from being exposed to Judge Duncan’s speech! It’s really a shame that the Stanford Law students didn’t get to hear Judge Duncan speak. Maybe Dean Jenny Martinez can bring in Judge Duncan to give the half-day mandatory training on free speech and professional norms. Now THAT would be some lovely karmic justice.

Featured image: Notre Dame Law School, via Eccekevin on Wikimedia Commons, cropped, Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)