Yale Law School used to produce great men. Justices like Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh. Public servants like John Bolton and John Yoo. Patriots like Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes.
The "number one" law school has been going downhill for a long time, but we trace its precipitous decline to 2017, the year that Heather Gerken became the law school’s (first ever female) dean. First came the bitching over the Kavanaugh nomination. Then came the meltdown over traphouse-gate. Then the pathetic hissy fit that disrupted a bipartisan panel on free speech.
By the time the Dobbs decision was leaked—we’d wager by a Yale Law clerk—students at the law school were calling to overthrow democracy and abolish the Constitution. Could the legal profession survive the coming flood of snot-nosed snowflakes? Could America?
One man wasn’t going to wait to find out.
In September, Fifth Circuit judge James Ho announced that he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School. "Customers can boycott entities that practice cancel culture," Ho said. "I wonder how a law school would feel if my fellow federal judges and I stopped being its customers."
More than a dozen of Ho’s colleagues, including the 11th Circuit’s Elizabeth Branch, eventually joined the boycott.
To an institution that derives much of its stature from clerkship placements, the gambit offered a stark ultimatum: Give up your prestige or grow a pair. Well, last month, Gerken pulled the school out of the U.S. News and World Report Rankings. Sayonara, top law school!
For clapping back at the campus bullies and for helping to knock Yale down a peg, congratulations, Judge Ho: You are a Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.
