If you thought law students hijacking classes for inane exercises in "naming the violence" was bad, just wait. While my law school experience did not involve scandals of national interest, it was punctuated by students attempting to do anything—lecture, agitate, yell—except learn from others.
Here’s one story I’ll never forget, from the same criminal law class where my classmates pestered their uber-progressive professor to say she thought rape was wrong. We were studying the 1971 revolt at Attica state prison in New York, which left 10 prison workers and 33 inmates dead. Prosecutors subsequently chose not to press charges against corrections officers who had allegedly brutalized and possibly murdered some of the rioters. The episode gave a panorama view of the issues we cover in criminal law, such as theories of punishment, prosecutorial discretion, and self-defense.
Who needs to ask difficult questions, though, when you smell an opportunity to signal your progressive bona fides? One of my classmates raised a Zoom hand, but when called on did not ask a question. Instead, she began to read the "Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands" verbatim and in full. While it is mostly very reasonable and sympathetic, the manifesto is quite long. When she finished reading it, my classmate, having worked herself into a feverish state over the several minutes she spent reading, added with a scream that racialized capitalism was responsible for the mistreatment of the inmates. Only a revolution would fix things. Some classmates chimed in over Zoom chat to applaud this act of bravery. The professor thanked the young woman who had interrupted her. The only time Attica came up again for the rest of the course was when we learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese, whose story has wrongly come to stand for the idea that bystanders will fail to intervene if they think others will—because Genovese’s rapist and murderer had participated in the uprising.
That there are one or even a few people who would use their $100,000-per-year legal education (or, more likely, social-justice scholarship) to pontificate rather than think is unremarkable. Every institution has its zealots. What is remarkable is how comfortable my classmate felt interrupting a class to indulge her own solipsistic sense that she had more to tell everyone than the professor would. That comfort was justified, it turned out. Radical students, protected by a vast bureaucracy of ideologues who code left-wing views as desirable DEI and right-wing views as hate speech that are, at best, tolerated begrudgingly, run elite law schools. In fact, that’s mostly what law schools are now: Progressive madrassas where you learn first the doctrines of contracts and torts, and then to denigrate those doctrines as part of systems of oppression set up by straight white men to enrich themselves and subjugate others. Learning the tastes and habits of the radical chic is central to the enterprise.
It doesn’t take a legal mind of Ilya Shapiro’s caliber to diagnose this problem, but given Shapiro’s background in classical liberalism and the inquisition he suffered at the hands of Georgetown Law students and administrators, he is as fit as anyone to do so. (Full disclosure: Shapiro is a colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute.) In Lawless, Shapiro alternates between his own story of mistreatment at the hands of Georgetown’s "leadership"—not a particularly apt term given its behavior—and general analysis about the radicalization of American law schools.
The two are closely related. Shapiro had been hired to run a center-right outfit from within Georgetown Law, but sent a questionably worded tweet that his new employer met with a sham investigation and character assassination. (You can read plenty of good coverage of the affair here at the Washington Free Beacon, though Shapiro’s full version is still revelatory.) Other Georgetown professors have also been punished for stating facts that progressives do not like to hear.
Though law schools still profess to be what they once were—educational institutions that value the pursuit of knowledge—they are actually designed now to produce ideology rather than knowledge. That is why they could not tolerate Shapiro’s presence—nor the presence of heretics like Judge Kyle Duncan, Professor Amy Wax, or even liberals who would engage with conservative Christians—while progressive radicals feel no compunction about spouting their views from cushy faculty and administrative positions.
Shapiro advances a syllogism so simple it is practically undeniable. Lawyers wield tremendous power across every sector of American society; law schools, especially the highest-ranked, are training students to wield that power immaturely and irresponsibly; therefore, law schools need immediate reform to avert an imminent national disaster.
What kind of reform could do the trick?
A demonstrated (not just stated) commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and ideological diversity is Shapiro’s preferred solution. He recommends that law schools adopt the triad of policies developed at his alma mater of University of Chicago to clarify and protect true free speech. "It’s not rocket science," Shapiro writes repeatedly, notwithstanding students at elite law schools claiming not to know the difference between free speech and censorship. Heckler’s vetoes don’t count; neither do other forms of disruptive conduct that involve speech but prevent others from speaking. Enforce rules governing conduct without fear or favor. Law schools should not weigh in on world events that do not directly touch their campus. And for heaven’s sake, stop cracking down on professors who say offensive things.
The open campus may be a north star, but law schools are in much more dire conditions than can be fixed by a revolution in free inquiry. As Shapiro repeatedly demonstrates, their problems run deeper than self-censoring conservatives and occasional witch hunts against dissident figures. Free speech norms wouldn’t keep the Georgetown Law administrators, who threw Shapiro to the wolves by defaming him as a racist, from failing up until they landed plum jobs. It doesn’t address the complete capture of my own law school by radical students, who have graduated from interrupting classes and other misdeeds to posting unabashed support for the terrorist group Hamas on social media. (Our former student body president, ousted for sending a post-October-7 anti-Israel message in the student government’s name without permission, was also filmed vandalizing posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.)
Just recently, the anti-Israel contingent at Georgetown Law, which could not abide free-speech maximalist Ilya Shapiro, invited as a guest speaker a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who recently completed a stint in prison for her role in murdering a 16-year-old girl. Law schools are plagued by militant moral backwardness. They have been taken over by ideologues advancing an illiberal, intolerant, and often immoral worldview. The cancellations and mobs Shapiro documents are an important symptom, but they are a symptom indeed of a much more serious disease.
Near the end of his book, in suggesting a wide suite of reforms that might move law schools in the right direction, Shapiro correctly takes aim at the diversicrats more responsible than any for law schools’ corruption.
[A]dmissions deans should be evaluated for admitting students with the character to respect norms of free speech and open inquiry. It’s all well and good to screen for academic achievement via GPA and reasoning skills via LSAT—which, along with racial diversity, have long been the primary metrics for law school applicants—but admissions offices, particularly at higher-ranked schools, have been too focused on admitting activists instead of advocates, social-justice warriors instead of scholars.
Amen to that—and then some. Law schools are generally quite small. Yale Law School accepts just a few hundred students per year. Each class comprises not the top LSAT-scorers or Ivy League magna cum laude undergrads, but a carefully calibrated mix of characteristics. The Federalist Society must have its 10 students per year (or, where I went, 5). Affinity groups must have enough Jewish, black, Asian, or gay 1Ls to achieve continuity beyond the three-year cycle. There must even be a few people who signal in their applications that they would be willing to sing and dance as part of "Law Revue" musical theater. All the while each class must average a stellar—yet consistent year-to-year—LSAT score. At top schools, it is no exaggeration to say each admit is hand-picked.
Yet each year without fail, students at elite law schools manage to say and do abhorrent things, often in fairly large groups. Administrators announce their very serious disappointment in those students, who, against all evidence, are deemed to have not lived up to the values of the school and do not represent it. Yet not only are those students not expelled even if they repeatedly break school rules, their ranks seem replenished with each admissions cycle. It is almost as if the schools are selecting for students who will be activists, radicals, and rule-breakers.
Fine, not almost—they are obviously doing exactly that. Elite law schools love activists, celebrate them at every opportunity, and invite applicants to share their proudest activist achievements in personal statements as back entry into schools with otherwise-demanding academic requirements. Perhaps administrators do not expel them or change admissions criteria to filter them out because they see credentialing tomorrow’s radicals as the law school’s highest calling. That cycle is not going to stop itself. It will take government investigations, lawsuits, firings, and probably some more public shamings of the kind that led to leadership changes at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia. When the underbrush of ideological capture is cleared, free and open campuses can emerge without backsliding into the same bad habits.
If and when that does happen, Shapiro will have earned a victory lap. He has alerted Americans to the serious problem of law schools’ corruption, by publicizing his story in all its discomfiting detail and tying it in persuasively to a larger narrative about ideological capture and institutional cowardice.
Lawless is bracing. It presents a useful path forward for law schools that might want to take corrective action before a Trump administration Department of Education forces them to, while laying the groundwork for readers to understand that everywhere else pushback will be fierce and hysterical. Those of us who accept Shapiro’s simple syllogism about law schools’ importance and their flagrant abdication of responsibility have one question left to ponder: Are we prepared, mentally and emotionally, to root out the corruption in our elite-producing institutions even if they try to do to us what they did to him?
Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites
by Ilya Shapiro
Broadside Books, 272 pp., $29.99
Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.