There’s a cultural revolution occurring in America’s legal system By Andrea Widburg
People who hate lawyers like to quote Shakespeare’s line from Henry VI: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That’s completely wrong. In the play, it was the anarchy-demanding mob that gave voice to the sentiment. Lawyers are the bulwark of the rule of law and civil society. That’s why it matters that today’s law students and young lawyers are demanding that any lawyers who deviate from woke principles when it comes to representing people or issues must be silenced and, if possible, destroyed.
It used to be that every law student learned about John Adams successfully representing the hugely unpopular British soldiers charged with murder for the Boston Massacre. He did so because he understood a principle that I vividly remember my criminal law professor articulating almost 40 years ago: Nobody, no matter the charge against him, should have to stand alone before the awesome majesty of the government which, ultimately, is both judge and executioner.
That concept is completely lost today, something that burst into full public awareness last week when more than 100 Yale law students, through noise and physical intimidation, made it impossible for Kristen Waggoner, of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, to speak (ironically enough) about free speech—with almost no administrative pushback and no consequences.
Aaron Sibarium, who broke the story, has written a comprehensive essay for Bari Weiss’s Substack, entitled “The Takeover of America’s Legal System.” With example after example, Sibarium walks readers through the relentless attacks that law students and young lawyers are making on core concepts such as the right to representation, due process, and free speech.
The article paints a chilling picture of radical Maoists who believe that the law exists solely to silence those with whom they disagree and empower the people and ideas they support. The opening anecdote is illustrative. The young lawyers at Boies, Schiller and Flexner, a firm that had represented Al Gore in 2000 and gay marriage in California in 2013, were so outraged that the firm dared to represent Harvey Weinstein that they asked for severance pay to fund them as they looked for work at other firms.
Sibarium explains how Critical Race Theory is being forced into law school curricula:
Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality” and assessing its “differential effects on subordinated groups,” according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them.
As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the start of law school and “at least once again before graduation.”
Law schools are also training students to believe that verdicts that go against their political viewpoints (e.g., Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal) are evidence that the legal system they’re being trained to enter is unjust and racist.
Those professors who wish to teach their students to think like actual lawyers—looking at issues from all sides—are being silenced. As one self-identified liberal professor said, “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family.” The essay shows he’s not the only one. Professors in law schools across America are self-censoring lest the student mob destroy them.
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Part of the problem, as with every facet of academia, is the growth of administrators. Yale now has more administrators than faculty members—and most of these administrators serve leftist causes tied to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DIE”), and tied to race, gender, sexual identity, etc.
I can’t do justice to Sibarium’s essay. You really must read it for yourself. What I can do, though, is tell you that what’s happening now is chillingly similar to Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Then, too, radicalized college students were encouraged to be the vanguard of a social revolution that silenced, and often murdered or otherwise destroyed, every knowledgeable, professional person in China. By the time the madness ended, as many as 20 million people were dead.
In 1994, I watched To Live, a movie about a couple living through everything from the Chinese Civil War to the end of the Cultural Revolution. The most memorable scene occurred when their beloved only child, a daughter, was having a problematic labor. At the hospital, they were met by arrogant medical students who told them that the professors, with their outdated pre-revolutionary ideas, had been sent to hard labor. Tended only by students schooled in revolution, not medicine, the daughter bled to death.
With these Maoist revolutionaries populating our legal system, our country is in danger of bleeding to death. This madness must stop now.
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