all right.

well, good afternoon welcome to. the american enterprise institute book event law schools gone lawless. thank you all for joining us today. i'm jeff rosen. i'm a nonresident fellow here at the enterprise institute and some of you may know me from past roles i've played government, i've been a lawyer for more than 40 years and i've previously taught at a law school. but those are only two of the many reasons why i'm enthused for today's discussion about a book that addresses law and law schools and the chance to talk with the author of the book. this is a book that will get the attention of law schools but a wider readership as well. so i'm very pleased to have the opportunity to introduce our speaker for today's book event, ilya shapiro, and talk with him about his book, lawless. so first, a few words about ilya

shapiro, our author. ilya is currently the director of constitutional studies at the manhattan institute. and as we'll discuss later for a brief time, he was previously the executive director at the georgetown law school's center for the constitution. and ilya is a legal scholar. and during his career, he has filed more than 500 briefs in the supreme court, and he's written for several publications, including as examples the harvard journal of law and public, the wall street journal, the washington post, national and others. he's also author of a previous book called supreme disorder judicial nominations and the politics of america's highest court. he is the coauthor of religious liberties for corporations, and he was an editor of 11 volumes of cato's court review. he has spoken at law schools and at events with all over our country.

his new book, walls the miseducation of america elites. and you can see we have copies over here. his new book documents his experience at georgetown law in 2022 after a single tweet about presidents supreme president biden, supreme court nominee led to calls for his immediate firing from georgetown law. he's going to tell us something about that. so i won't get into the details. but what happened to ilya three years ago, again, highlighted danger that campus orthodoxies can pose to freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher education. cecilia has now written a book about not just that episode, but more broadly about the situation at top law schools and what's to be done now in some ways, we've been warned about parts of before. i might be the only one in this room old enough to remember

this, but back in the 1990s, a couple of authors named david sachs and peter thiel wrote a book about illiberalism at stanford called the diversity myth multiculturalism, the politics of intolerance. that book warns that leading academic institutions were adopting anti-western zealotry, silencing dissent and stifling intellectual life. other authors in that time frame sounded the alarm as well. and i would have to say unsuccessfully if one reads ilya shapiro is a book about the events 30 years later, morrison early in his new book, ilya shapiro describes his thoughts on how the long rise of liberalism and the unchecked decline of intellectual diversity and civil discourse in law schools has contributed to a climate of intolerance and antithetical to the mission of legal education and legal profession.

as he'll discuss in a few moments, the book describes a sobering where a stanford law school mob can shut down a federal judge's speech at a federalist society event where radical columbia students can set up illegal encampments on their campus and threaten others where heterodox faculty are not hired. at some law schools and where several federal judges even refused to hire yale law students because of the law. school's troubling record with regard to free expression and free thought. so elias book provides an answer to a question on many people's minds, which is where have schools gone wrong? quote in the past, he writes. columbia law school produce leaders like franklin delano roosevelt and ruth bader ginsburg. now it produces window smashing activists, close quote. elliott provides a timely perspective of what he sees occurring at of america's elite law schools. what it means for the future,

the legal profession and. what should be done. so it's my great to welcome ilya shapiro to stage to talk about his book and then he and i will discuss the book. and later after that, we'll invite all of you to ask questions. so, ilya, thank you very much for being. and the podium is now yours. well, i'm delighted to be here. this isn't my first time speaking at aei, but it's my first time speaking since they completely redid this building. maybe it's my first time speaking in this building. actually. i remember the old one and it's an organization whose events i've long attended and whose scholars i've enjoyed interact them with and working with. so thanks very much, jeff and yuval levin, who couldn't it tonight for for hosting me and indeed auspicious that my event

in d.c. comes on the third anniversary of the notorious tweet that was the seed for what eventually became this book, lawless. indeed, it was three years ago that news of justice breyer's retirement broke and i was commenting all day in my area of expertise my last book as mentioned, supreme disorder, was about the politics of judicial nominations in the supreme court. i was commenting in the media and that night coming back to my hotel room, not a best practice, by the way. here's your and he lawyers. here's your seely component do not doom scroll twitter late at night when you're on the road getting more and more upset as in my case i was about president biden deciding to restrict his candidate pool for breyer's successor by race and sex. you know, i argued that the

chief judge of the d.c. circuit, sri srinivasan, who happens to be an indian-american immigrant, was the best choice, meaning by basic operation of logic, everyone else was less qualified. and so if biden kept his promise, he would pick what given twitter's character limit? i in our fully characterized as a lesser black woman now, i deleted that tweet, but still think that biden should have considered all possible candidates as. 76% of the american people agreed, at least according to that right wing rag abc. so anyway, that was three, three years ago, three years ago today. i don't want to recount. i, you know, in excruciating detail, can read the book, the four days of hell, where it wasn't clear whether my entire professional life would be crumbling over this tweet, that my ideological enemies misinterpreted to go after my job and then for that followed

with four months of following hell purgatory a month a month into this this investigation since i wasn't fired nor vindicated initially i was suspended pending an investigation into whether i had violated university policies on harassment and anti-discrimination. well, a month later, i tried to speak what's now called u.s. law center, formerly known as hastings. you see, hastings. and the response i got there was a little different than this warm welcome that you all are giving me. the response the students gave was basically shut up. at least cleaned up for polite company. there was chanting and banging everywhere. it was like. and occupy wall street meeting. it was the first time i'd ever been disrupted. more than a thousand public speaking events. and it's a -- indictment of the state academia at a time when a toxic cloud has enveloped all of our public discourse, the the

federal society chapter had invited me to discuss my last book, which had become all the more timely with with breyer's retirement. and at that point now justice jackson had just nominated but a heckler's veto prevailed, applying a bad faith lens to a poorly phrased in which, as i said, i criticized president biden. maybe i was harassing him georgetown that i'm not sure activists called me a racist misogynist in my expertise illegitimate. so suspended from the job that i was about to start at the at the center for the constitution, which we've now learned is an important center, because the rest of the law school is the center against the constitution pending an investigation into whether violated these university policies. and now the students who shut down my event at hastings are u.s. law. s.f. by the way, where i'm return next week very curious. obviously it's kind of like dazed and confused. i get older, they stay the same age. new cohort of students. three years later, we'll we'll see what but but anyway the

students did not want to hear my analysis or anything else and they reacted in the vilest language, which i'm not going to repeat several times, literally getting in face and blocking my access to the lectern. the protesters also castigated their own school for allowing me to speak and called for a diverse student representative as two approved speakers. plus, of course, training and critical race theory. never mind that hastings is public institution would be violating the first amendment if it disapproved speaker's based on the content of their speech. and never mind that as one of the deans advised them in the few minutes when the protesters weren't chanting and banging, i had briefly stepped out, confer with the officers of fed chocolate invited me. i told them, you know, just be paid for an hour. i'm just gonna stand there for an hour. but at that time, the dean told the students that not not allowing and invited speaker to speak was against the rules. and as the school's chancellor pointed out in an email the next day, quote, an event to prevent

a speaker from being heard is a violation of our code of conduct, which the college will indeed must enforce. but it enforced and nobody was disciplined. now, you'd think that law students would have more appreciation for or engaging with controversial topics than undergraduates. after all, they'll be facing much harder issues in their career than speakers they don't like. but my experience was no isolated incident. not even for that month of march of 2022, the following week, similar thing happened at yale. ironic at an event bringing together speakers from the left and the right who agreed on nothing other than the importance of free. and then it happened. another disruption at michigan when students obstructed a debate on texas heartbeat bill. and then a year later, as as jeff alluded to, the shutdown of judge kyle duncan at stanford. the only thing these events had in common was that they featured non progressive speakers. we've gotten to a place where

questioning affirmative action abortion is outside the academic overton window. the acceptable range of policy he views. it's all well and to adopt strong speech policies. all of these schools have them georgetown included very good policy on or on pixels. but it's not enough. if administrators aren't willing to stand up to those who demand censorship proliferating, dci offices enforce and orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity undermines equal opportunity and excludes dissenting voices. now, as for me, after four month investigation, georgetown reinstated me. dean, bill traynor, me on the technicality that i wasn't an employee when i tweeted. they paid a lot of money to see what law firm to have a junior associate look at the calendar and tell them that. but but the office of institutional equity and affirmative action idea set me up for discipline the next time i transgressed progressive

orthodoxy. they said the next time i offended someone, i'd create a hostile educational environment and i'd be back in star chamber trainer reiterated these concerns, noting the harmful of my tweets. now, after considering that report i got from and taken counsel from, my lawyer from randy barnett, who hired me, a law professor at georgetown and my wife was here in the front row, better lawyer than all of us. i concluded that remaining in my job was untenable. i couldn't do the job. i was hired to do. so rather participating in that slow motion firing, i quit. and as one does, i published my resignation letter in the wall street journal and announced my move to the manhattan. on tucker carlson show on fox. and you know i didn't for this but i've been using the platform that i've been given to shine a light on the rot in academia live not lies warned solzhenitsyn let the lie come into the world. let it even triumph, not through

me. and that's my mantra. in fall of that year, 2022, when justice thomas withdrew from teaching at gw, it was just one more example of the poisonous atmosphere in academia that makes it impossible to have a free exchange of ideas. gw administrators rightly noted that, you know, he shouldn't be fired or canceled for his vote to overturn roe v wade. but the fact that they needed to make that statement showed, how they'd failed to instill a culture of open inquiry and truth seeking. it's a shame that thomas felt the need to withdraw and a stark contrast to what was going on at harvard, celebrating return of justice breyer. now, i'm generally optimistic about america with brett kavanaugh. i live on the sunrise side of the mountain and perhaps we're past woke in society generally but we may have passed the point of no return in terms of the illiberal take of higher education. that's particularly dangerous

law schools which train and produce the gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions. and i want to be clear i do mean. what we're seeing is not the decades old conservative complaint about liberal bias in the faculty the the hippies taking over the faculty. i mean those those original hippies. the berkeley free speech movement would now be considered retrograde white supremacy lists by these radicals. and we have weak leaders who placate this illiberal left that now drives campus culture. university officials facilitate, even foment social justice mobs. the divide at stanford egged the mob that was shouting down duncan and everyone else keeps their head down so as not to be caught in the cancellation crossfire. and that's largely a story of growing bureaucracies. right. we can talk about ideology. all we want and faculty bias. but this kind, less sexy area is, i think as much or more

important, the statistics on the growth, these left skewed, non-teaching staff are mind boggling. the number of university employees who don't teach has grown many multiples of growth of faculties or even students, while tuition has soared even more uniform statistics are hard to come by for the last ten years or so. the survey agencies change their questions they obfuscate certain things. suffice it to say it's a problem. and now all institutions have more non-teaching staff than faculty. non-teaching staff who are not raised with academic values or virtues of academic freedom or open inquiry, what have you. the national association of higher education diversity officers, for example, a real organization with of members. you know, their goal is not to create knowledge or to advance

open inquiry. it is something else as i'll get to these. these trends are particularly acute in so-called elite places at stanford, for example, the school, the number of admins grew by 30% from 2017 to 2022, and the school has nearly twice as many non-teaching staff as undergrads, nearly six times as many as faculty. so the joke was a 100 years ago, yale students came with their own personal butlers. well, now these edu crats, as i call them, maybe they're going to be butlers for some of, these students. in effect, students and families are paying a lot more to subsidize well-paid class of bureaucrats. and administrators are more radical than professors. and of their incentive as it is in the public, is to justify enhance their own authority and budgets. so they manufacture outrage,

investing it, punish it, etc. this is, you know, my answer. olson, great political economist, said that the growth of bureaucracy leads to the decline of nations. and that is exactly the dynamic here as these apparatchiks with no connection to teaching or research chill speech and eviscerate due process. now, having gained a sense for the overall trend, let's look at d.i. diversity officers are a fairly recent phenomenon that really started growing after the michigan affirmative action cases at the supreme court in 2003. these diverse recruits typically serve a special advisers to presidents and outside the normal hierarchy of of university administration. a 2021 survey of 65 large universe cities representing percent of all students at four year institutions. the old power five football conferences. you know, now we have kind of two major football conferences and kind of others reshuffling but anyway, the power for the

old power 565 schools found that the average school, more than 45 people devoted to d-i, which is more than the number of history professors at the university of michigan. 261 people have authority, full time authority over d-i. double that. if you include part time at a cost of more than $30 million a year. imagine spending on student support services or scholarships or what have you. this is the fastest growing segment of the educational bureaucracy with staffs on average four times larger than those provide mandated accommodations to students disabilities. and let me be clear in this survey, when talk about d-i high growth and bureaucratic bloat, this excludes those who people who handle legally mandated requirements enforcing title nine or state and federal civil rights laws, you exclude, exclude those lawyers and support staff. this is just this other stuff

and they fail on their own terms. campus climate surveys show that student satisfaction generally comfort with diversity, specifically does not correlate or even maybe inversely correlates with the size and budgets of d-i offices. so the real danger is that universities no longer focus on free inquiry in pursuit of knowledge. instead, they deploy this army of non-teaching edu crats that either distracts from that by providing therapeutic coddling or actively prevents truth seeking by enforcing an ideological orthodoxy. having staff organize student social lives. holding their hands while they process the trauma of election results. they don't like infantilize as the young adults who should be training the workplace and public square. having staff organize trainings, rallies and struggle sessions to enforce narrow perspectives on sex and class prevents the development of critical thinking skills that students to become

well-adjusted professionals. it also shifts power away from faculty and gives it to political commissars whose goals diverge from long held, long held, higher ed values. d-i offices abroad in terms like harassment and discrimination as well as therapeutic terms, like harm and safety, not to equal opportunity or a welcoming environment, but to enforce progressive ideology. as i said, the behavior of stanford's deciding and egging on mob was illustrative of how these are antithetical to university's. and then there's the shift from education to indoctrination. when i was in law school in the early 2000s, we thought that the critiques critical legal studies critical theory, all that this kind of hegelian dialectic culturally marxist discourse that was something the eighties and early nineties it was a spent force relegated back to its niche in sociology departments or area studies or what have you.

well, the critics are back, and not just in literature. and sociology. regardless of what's going on in k-12 or even undergrad teaching. derrick bell, kimberly crenshaw have eclipsed blackstone and brandeis as avatars of legal education. that shift when, coupled with the bureaucratic growth, has led institutions to prioritize activism over inquiry seeking social justice than truth. so i'm pessimistic that anything will change at any school where freedom isn't supported or rules against heckler's vetoes takeovers of academic buildings and encampments that block student access aren't enforced. too few administrators follow the example of the late u. chicago president bob zimmer, who, in response to pressure to punish professor dorian abbott for criticizing affirmative action, reaffirmed the university's commitment to faculty freedom to disagree the university policy. too few followed the leader vanderbilt chancellor daniel

dear meyer, who ejected and expelled students who had taken over his office. he's gotten national plaudits for some very basic actions. it's a low bar. wherever leaders stand up for the core mission of any academic institution, the mob disperses. but most presidents and deans are spineless cowards. they're not woke radicals. they're careerists, unwilling confront the illiberal inmates who have taken over their institutions. mere statements about academic freedom declining to fire supreme court justices are not enough. they have to instill a culture of respect for opposing views and enforce policies against disruption of educational programing. that means dismantling the bureaucracy. these that undermine classical liberal values and ending loyalty oaths in the form of diversity statements. and deans are really good at instilling whatever values they want be that entrepreneurship public service, social justice, whatever they can do that for

open inquiry and civil discourse. when i left georgetown, i was not holding my breath about the prospect reform, but maybe now we're finally seeing a backlash to our inquisitors. i'm still not sure it can all be done from within. so we need external controls from state legislators and attorneys general and congressional oversight to federal funding. we also need what economists call exogenous, like judge hose boycott of yale and stanford for clark hiring, plus employers shying away hiring those who support hamas or who scream at federal judges that they hope their daughters are raped. and we need public exposure. in february of 2023, about two years ago, my now colleague at the manhattan institute, john saylor, who is an investigative reporter, got some documents from foya and freedom information act and published an op ed, one op ed in the wall street journal about how texas tech, a public school, used

diversity statements to hire biologists. the very next day, the president university. we're not going to do that anymore. that's not appropriate. we've seen similar dynamics in other institutions. so that gives me some cautious hope because to mix metaphors, some of these structures are potemkin villages guarded by paper tigers. claudine gay, harvard president crystallizes the larger. she is a mediocre academic who was elevated advancing progressive orthodoxy while checking the right intersectional boxes. she is the apotheosis of an anti-tnf electoral movement that values deep identity and activism over truth seeking merit and education. that movement is designed to prefer commissars over scholars, the gaze, resignation, and the departure of presidents elsewhere doesn't end the university's troubles, for that matter. dean traynor, georgetown, recently announced that he would

be leaving the deanship at the end of the semester. i don't know whether that was in anticipate in my book, but the timing was interesting. the school harbored or georgetown law. any of these schools that i talk about in my book is still plagued by a toxic campus culture ideological corruption and bureaucratic bloat that stifle discourse. fire the foundation for individual rights and expression recently named harvard, the worst school in the country for free speech for the second straight year. well, harvard may be the worst on and other measures, but it's by no alone. look it doesn't take long to destroy reputations built over decades and centuries. the question now is whether higher education grandees are willing to do the work to restore their tarnished stature. there's still a long way to go before universities return to mission of seeking truth and knowledge and law school's return to their goal of teaching future lawyers to uphold the

rule of law. but the battle's been joined. thanks very much. i look forward to the discussion. well, thanks for those observations and and kind of a in a way of of a whole book that hopefully people are going to read. but i wanted to start with how the book came about. obviously, you know, the episode that you've shared with us is an important part of it. certainly start there. when you started getting this this reaction to your tweet and the suspension in an investigation, what kind of reaction did you get from others in academia? did you get people supporting you quietly publicly at all or how did that go? there were. two faculty members at

georgetown law, basically the only two other non progressive types who had dropped me. nice lines. i got some notes from others in academia. i mean, i got a lot of support from outside of academia and that was ultimately how i survived this between fire and barry weiss and camille foster and the wall street journal editorial national review. so many people came out to defend me publicly and then also behind the scenes board of visitors, people back channeling to the to the dean and things like that. but yeah, academe me not so other than people who are already my friends. so, so one of the things in the book that i thought was interesting, the episode was you said you, you conferred with fire the foundation for individual and education, as it used to be. i forget it. now, an expression expression unfortunate that they've had a broaden their remit. so and and if if i got this right in the book say they advised you not to apologize for

the way you had phrased that the tweet. i'm interested both how that discussion went and and what you decided to do and why. so this kind of the deleted chapter from book which ended up becoming an article city journal magazine which i commend to you, it's the manhattan institute publication. i've been reading it for more than 20 years, long before i joined them, i and i talked about, you know, i forget what it's called is like how to survive, cancel culture or should i apologize or something like this. and it all depends on your goal. you know, i would have acted differently during this episode. if i had decided that i'm just to milk the moment i'm going to monetize, i'm going to become a, you know, right wing darling or something like that, a martyr, things like that. i would have acted differently if i, you know, just wanted to lead a quiet and kind of become a down academic and abrogate myself, things like that. but i didn't want either of

those two things or, you know certain other things, you know, going for another job somewhere else. i wanted that. i want it to survive and that job and do the job that i've been hired, which present an opportunity to have a different kind of impact on the world, which is what i'm all about. and i was advised by people other than fire that because, you know, i'm not apologize to the twitter mob that's pointless and that is counterproductive. i fully agree with fire on things like that but my was one person dean trainor and i was advised that he wanted an apology. so i said well what am i apologizing for? i you know, i missed worded things. okay, that it was a poorly worded tweet to this day. i admit that i say that, you know, who among us hasn't issued a worded tweet? and so i said that i was invited by other deans and professors at georgetown on the faculty listserv and otherwise to apologize further, using critical race theory, tropes and you know do the work this and and i declined to do that i'm

like i'm not that i praised i failed in communication which is you my bad but i'm that whether you're hiring judge or a janitor you shouldn't be considering race and sex and things like that. so in the early part of the book where you discussing the episode, you talk at georgetown, i think it's the dean. maybe it was someone other than the dean expressed concern because there had been students who were walking out of class in tears. and i think the dean was interested in in providing some sort of like a crying room and at what level at a school, at a so-called elite law school. also, there was a demand for reparations in the form of lunch. i mean, so. so that part what you just said comes through in the book out of. so now what i want to ask you this. you put yourself the position of

the administrators, the dean or other administrators. well, if students are behaving that way, whether you think it's appropriate or inappropriate, how do you think the administrators should react and respond if dean traynor had said on day one, this was bad communication and i don't agree with elia, but our speech and expression policy is clear and we do not police faculty speech. you know, there would have been something, but it would have dispersed quickly, at least based on when that path has taken elsewhere. that's generally what's happened so of how did you decide after going through this that, you would take the time energy commitment it takes to do a book. man plans and god laughs. my last book i with two

preschoolers in the house and it was hard it was hard on the family you know writing a book is a commitment you know rule one if any of you want to write a book at some point, if you haven't yet, rule one is apply but the chair you have to do that every day without fail for period of months until, you know, almost all it's done. and so this time we had our little cancellation, baby. that's another part of the whole personal story. while while the investigation was ongoing, we learned kristen was pregnant with twins. so i'd be, you know, really didn't want to write a book at that point with just the two elementary schoolers at this point, but the infants as well. but my agent got me a good deal with the publisher that approached me about doing it. and i thought they made me an offer i can't refuse. i got to do it. i certainly have things to get off my chest. that's important topic. let's do it. and i tried to get it done as quickly as possible to rip off the band-aid. so here we are. so one of the things i'm always

interested when you do a book is who do you see as the intended audience or audiences? because on the one hand, you could picture this being a book to try to persuade law school deans, an administrator is or this could be a book to rally who are concerned about the more problematic episodes are described and or you could have multiple i'm just there how did you think about that? who you say is the intended audience for the book? well, it's a popular book, meaning it wasn't with an academic press that wasn't my goal. it's with harpercollins. they're broadside implant imprint and you know, anyone interested in public affairs, certainly law school, both academics and students as well as the legal profession but people more broadly and you know, after october 7th, when. the crisis in higher education really came to the fore, became a central part of the national discourse, i thought, okay, this will get even more purchase

because as i said, you know, a lot of what i talk about what you heard me just just mention in my prepared remarks is common to higher ed in general. you know, there are certain things and certain worrying about law schools. and that's where, you know, my focus lay. but this know, as bill ackman wrote in a in a very important essay that came the same day the court in gay resigned the harvard presidency. anti-semitism is the canary in the coal that pops up wherever are serious underlying problems and and i think that's that's what we've seen come out in higher ed so i think anyone who cares about you know the future of our educational system should be the the audience. so let me ask you just a couple of quick things on. the title lawless, what would you say is the core? what is lawless in the book, what that you're focused on the departure of law schools from

teaching the law? you know, i opened fairly early on with a vignette from the paper chase, which is a storied movie from now over 50 years ago, very kind of musty old school professor using socratic method, asking questions to get to the point he's making about the law and how everyone took the same course one year and he just got drilled in this is how you start like a lawyer and all of this and it's different now and a lot of students and a lot of faculty questioned the legitimacy of the law itself, which i think is dangerous because when you're undermining very foundations on which the republic. well, it's it's very dangerous, obviously, with that summit. so maybe maybe this is a related but the miseducation portion of america's elites is the subtitle.

so can you can you sort of point to what what are the aspects that are miseducation because presumably law schools are still teaching contracts and torts and constitutional for example somewhat i mean depends some of these classes not just constitutional law or civil rights some some of the more politically contentious things. you know, there are criminal classes where they don't teach, you know, the curriculum because it's triggering or what have you, how are you supposed to be a prosecutor or a criminal defense lawyer if that's what you're doing or if you can't entertain certain types arguments, how do you zealously represent your client, whether it be in court or in, negotiate as if, you know, half the other side's argument is something that you're you don't even allow your mind to entertain. you know, there's a lot of it from the faculty and also from the kind of culture created by the bureaucracies. that's that's a miseducation. so so i referenced in in the introduction of you the your

book from 30 years ago there have been a number books over the years that sure you're familiar with the alan blum closing of the mind back in 1987. and charles allen, of course, shadow university, the betrayal of liberty on campuses and the like. i haven't read them all. so i don't purport to know them all, but it seemed to me those were about universities. and your book is very focused to law schools. of is there with regard to law schools, would you say they're a subset of the same issue that the universities are dealing with or is it something different? well, there's a great deal of overlap, of course, because they share administrations they are governed together. know the dean is part of the the cabinet, if you will, of the president. and they work with the provost and things like that they don't exist in a vacuum. but there are problems unique to

law schools. you know, if you're if teaching if you're teaching the rule of law and the attitude is free speech is part of widespread mercy or that, you know, people should be sentenced, you know, equality under the is is a sham and people be sentenced based on their race for equivalent conduct. that's real problem in law. schools more than if you're teaching the exact same to anthropology or sociology students, because after all, again, lawyers become implement this stuff. they are the, you know, disproportionately among state and federal legislators. you know, they occupy so many important positions in executive branch authorities alone. the the obvious prosecutors in general counsel's offices, the fortune 500 companies. so in your remarks and i think this is in the book as well you make the point i forget how you

put it that the the critical scholars had been put put back sociology or literature. but less less to send it in the law schools. at one point. and one of the thoughts i had is, as you were saying, was, well, of course, people who sociology or literature often become important public figures in their own ways. sometimes they go to law school and become become so there is there something about law schools that calls for special attention? well, just like medical schools and what's going on, there is literally a matter of life and death and the subversion of merit are is scary just like it is for air traffic controllers, pilots and things like that for obvious reasons i in law schools you know you know the the occasional sociologist who becomes a big public intellectual aside it's it's it's more dangerous subvert and

have an illiberal take over of law schools than of and of these more academic departments now now clearly it's a sad thing and it's and it's bad for the development of human knowledge to have other things happen in academia but it's really has more direct practical consequences when it comes to law schools so in in about the problem that that your book addressing you put a focus on the growth of bureaucracy and the bureaucracy in part but the bureaucracy generally is as i read it and i think what i've heard some administrators say is the university has asked to do more campus security being an example for summer job placements or internships that that that the roles of of the university have have that how

you view that. well it's true that it used to be the case that you had many fewer you know deans and associate deans and vice or what have you in law schools and you know, in undergrad, the same person would be the study abroad advisor, the internship advisor and something else things like that. but why have those grown so much faster than either faculty or at especially in the, you know, in the digital age students can find and research internships themselves and all these it's it's certainly not mandated. and i don't you know, there some you know the early stages of a bureaucrat growth in the late nineties 2000 when schools started against each other for amenities you know the lazy rivers, the climbing walls and all of these sorts you know, fancier and things like that, you know, those those are non-teaching staff, of course,

but it's these other kind of administer raters that have a role, a culture rating, students, and orienting them in, you know, teaching them outside of class where the most of the growth has been in the last ten or 12 years. that's, you know, worrying even beyond the the financial consequences. so so another thing sometimes have heard people observe is not really the numbers of of of the bureaucracy. and it's about dea per se, because inclusion is, i think, widely supported. it's more creating a home for certain political activists. do see it that way. or do you see it there? sure. there's two things to say on that. one is the role of admissions officers. and now we've talked a lot about, you know, deans and presidents and we talked a lot

about diversity. but the admissions office plays a role here, especially elite places. you're yale, stanford's columbia's. they put a thumb on the scale for people who write in their personal statement you know i want to blow up and change the world and, you know, burn down these institutions and, remake them in this view that's going to get you more points than if you say you want to child molesters or you want to make markets more efficient for consumers, something like that. and admissions deans are complicit in the the transformation into activism rather than education. and the other thing is mismatch you know stuart taylor there is in the back wrote an amazing book detailing how when you apply identity and you end up with people of members of racial minorities clustering in lower quartiles than people observe, the school must be systemically racist. why are, you know, the racial minorities underperforming much more than everyone else so that

you know creates an activist cycle in and of itself as well as leading to failures where. you know, if you calibrate again, admissions, right, which hopefully some schools are doing in response to the supreme court opinion, although like the desegregation in the fifties and sixties, there's massive resistance which will have to be counteracted governmentally, um, but, you know, we're at the start of the, of the pushback on all of these things. so what about one of the things you were talking about that that again is in the book is from your point of view, it was about the ideological outlook of the faculty. more of these these activists in the administration. let's but in the book i thought this was interesting a page 170 you had a quantification that at georgetown and i'm just looking my notes you're three of 150 faculty would be considered

right of center and most of the rest of the faculty think that's you know three and a half too many so so why why do you think that's not an issue? oh, it is. it is. but that's kind of an age old issue that's not as different as it was, you know, ten, 20 years ago. and the continuation of that is why i'm. more pessimistic about academia than about society writ large, because there could be this doom spiral and there is such blatant ideological or viewpoint discrimination in hiring the kind of self as well as this is somewhat new the the old boomer liberals, if you will are different than the younger millennial there was a wall street journal op ed a few years ago by a classical liberal history or psychology professor or something who said that he, you know, he's about to retire, but he said he was afraid of his

students and, his younger faculty. and this is someone who was know a card carrying aclu member, you know, would have been one of those berkeley free speech and all that. so there is some dynamic, but at the end of the day, there's just not a critical mass and there's people who have blind spots who think that you know in the famous formulation that conservative is a is a mental tic or a, you know, a disorder or something like that. can't be a good, you know, english analyst. you're also conservative and things like that. so thinking about the situation of law schools, everyone who arrives there has already been through so to what. so there's been a lot of miseducation already. well, that was that was going to be the question. what what effect do you think that has on the illiberalism that you're concerned in k-12? i mean, look, these these don't arise in a vacuum. um, absolute. i mean, you know, is it harder

for law schools to, to take these incoming students. are they less prepared than they were when i was in law school? you know, you probably think that my generation is less prepared than when you were in law school because it's certain things have gotten softer. i'm sure. i'm sure there's something to that. but that doesn't excuse the law schools from, you know, not being able to churn out, especially, again, at these elite places. don't know how to write a proper memo, you know, are too stressed to face a deadline. i mean you hear these just bizarre stories quite apart from any ideological things. so let's let's take that as the the the platform to talk a little bit what your book discusses in terms of what might done about some of these things. and i guess, you know, a place to start is to what extent are students, in your view, part of the problem, part of the solution both? how do you how do you see that? well, student mobs are a problem. certainly, there's, you know, collective problems. there's, you know, the you most

students, even at what you could consider to be the worst places are the places with the worst campus cultures are not radical. they're not going in, you know, shouting at federal judges and, things like that. most of them are, you know, silent majority that just doesn't they just want to go get their credential well, find a good job, have some fun along the way. and that's about it and because of the failure in leadership that placate the rabble rousers, that makes it worse for everyone else. so early in the book, you talk about that incident at stanford with the federal judge and although the dean took some forward looking measures about, the school's policies there really no consequences to the students had disrupted the event. do you do you have views on whether more suspend means expulsions or other forms of of student discipline are are

desirable undesirable and she then fell up jenny is now the provost at stanford because again it's a very low and relative to that she you know did some good things her memo is a ten page memo about the disruption and about stanford's policies is worth reading although she does a couple of things wrong. one is the lack of discipline because she claims that not everybody can be identified. therefore nobody can be disciplined. you know, if that was the excuse, then nobody would ever be arrested or sent to jail for committing crimes and like that. the other thing is that she says that shutting down speakers is against the values of d-i and i'm not sure about that because i think stanford's did was you know welch trained in her profession you know evoked the you know her whole life. and if you can recall this episode was is it worth is the juice the squeeze right is what you have to say. judge duncan, the event was

going to be about how lower courts judge, given uncertainty from the supreme court about covid and guns and something else. you know, it wasn't anything that the students were protesting, but his mere presence there because he had worked, you know, filed briefs against sex marriage and wrote some things about abortion. and as a judge had had a so-called controversial opinion about pronoun usage of, prisoners and things like this. he was people's humanity. he, you know, creating his mere presence was harmed. so was the juice that he was going to give. worse worth the squeeze that textbook, the enforcement, you know, your rights, your the value of what you have to say depends on where you are in the privilege hierarchy. i mean, all of these things. so you know, perhaps there are some utopian platonic deny that, you know, can goes well with

free speech like dean martinez said, but haven't seen it in practice. so so a related question on the discipline type point. i think of it as boycotting the boycotters in book, you talk about some judges who are then refusing to recruit at certain law schools and and got some attention. so how do you see that? i'm in favor of it for reasons. judge jim hall of the fifth circuit, along with lisa branch of the 11th circuit, are sort of the ringleaders. this he has you know, jim howard i'm little biased towards this. he's been a long time friend and he defended me as well when he came to spoke at georgetown, he kind of ripped up his notes and started defending and then published that. and in that public defense, he also announced his boycott and talks about how, look, this is trying to pressure the school. this is forward looking so it's not anyone who was at the school

when he announced the boycott was not affected. same thing with yale said the same thing eventually when it was expanded to columbia for its inability to control anti-semitism. i think that's right. and you know, at the margins, students need to be aware of the policies of their schools just like imagine in fifties. you know, you just want to get a good education and you hear that ut-austin is a good place to go to law school. but they don't admit blacks. you have no problem with black, but they don't. you know, you just want to go back, you know, can a judge i'm not going to hire from there because of their policies. it's the same kind of trying to pressure, i think. i think it's a valid, valid way to go and i've been told that at yale of the reason why dean gerken, who has been i think, rightly criticized, including by in my book for various scandals that yale has had alumni at yale, say that this is good and this is one of the even though there's 14 judges involved, it's

it's been noticed and it's one of the pressure points that as, as dean gerken wants to become president gerken somewhere, some day that she's tried to fix. so just just a little bit of devil's advocacy here. how do you think conservatives react if some liberal judges said, we're not going to recruit anyone who's at a law school and joined the federalist or we're not going to recruit from a law school that's perceived as at least more balanced than some. they're welcome to do that if they want to make that point. a lot of judges don't hire federalist society members, and it's kind of well known. they don't feel the need to announce it per se. you can look at their hiring patterns and and whatnot. you know, a lot of judges do have ideological criteria and, you know, rightly so, you don't want to be aggravated. the whole year or work with someone necessarily. you know, some judges like to have counter clerks or what have

you, but others don't. it's, you know, depending on how you want to work, as long as it's, you know, transparency is important. so i'm glad if these were going to do that with yale and stanford columbia that they announced and made it a public thing rather than just kind of doing it subrosa, as i imagine some other judges already are. so on the same general topic of, you know, what, what can be done or what should be done. one of the interesting things i saw in your book was about admissions that i don't know that i'd seen this one before, but you advocated. and if i got this right, correct me if, i don't. that's your book. if that admissions focus on thank for doing the close reading by the way this is impressive. so i you an a on the book report so well maybe i should apply to law school but the way you suggest admissions officers

screening and valuing people who indicate in their in their essays or otherwise an interest being a practicing i don't mean this pejoratively but workaday lawyers people that want to work on or work on transactions or do you know the the daily job of lawyering? rather, what most lawyers do not want? not what i do, you know, but but but rather than than give extra credit, let's say, in applications to people who to be social activists or other kinds of of political actors. and i thought was kind of interesting. you want to elaborate on that? it's it's just that these are the patterns that that that we're seeing seeing. you know, it takes all kinds if you want to create well-balanced class, you want to you know, you don't want to just accept people

who want to do antitrust law or all people who want to do criminal law or something like that. but if that, you know, active trumps merit, then then it's then it's a problem. and again, i think it's more of a problem the higher up in the rankings you go with some exception. and and so one other thing on the what what is to be done in the book. talk about what you call the chicago of the university of chicago calvin principles of institutional neutrality, of free expression and merit in hiring if i can oversimplify those do you have thoughts on what it would take or how it would be that law schools and universities generally i guess what schools in particular would get there to to adopt the chicago trifecta that you advocate. well a number them have adopted the free speech principles. i said georgetown's policy or

stanford's policy, for that matter, are pretty good on paper. a lot of them are now belatedly. since october 7th, adopting institutional, you know, better late than then, you know, come on in. the water's. you know, not too many say that they discriminate based on ideology, in hiring. but it's a it's a truism that, you know, places like or george mason's law school can play moneyball and hire people that would otherwise be in higher ranked so-called more prestigious schools if there wasn't discrimination, you know. yeah there should be savvy, entrepreneurial deans who who play moneyball who say, look, the bar is very low. if i just make everyone with all views feel welcome and encourage civil discourse and, you know, bring back rigor and and graduate students that judges will be pleased with and

employers will be pleased with that is going to burnish the reputation of our law school. and i can get alumni on board with maybe that'll help me raise money because ultimately that's deans want it's will this raise me money and i think there's a way to pitch it so we're we're we're going to shift in just a couple of minutes to audience before we do that one that i might anticipate. so i'll ask it is we're here, aei and often there are young people are interested in in advice i so would you have any advice young conservatives who are thinking about law school how they think about the question of to let's say a top rank school that perhaps is subject to some of the criticisms in your book versus a school that's also a good law school but isn't maybe in the top 14, but more open to diverse viewpoints to more conventional

respect, free speech. do you have any thoughts about that well, conservative or otherwise? i would advise young people not to go to law school. i think a lot of people as a defaulter because they see it as prestigious or well i have this history degree. well, you know, what can i do with that? i don't know. law school seems kind of interesting. there's lot of lawyers who are, you know, powerful or prestigious or something. i'll just go do that. and that's not a good reason. i like in applying to law school is kind of to judaism you kind of approach times and if you're still committed then let's talk about it do you have the right reasons? what kind of lawyer do you want to be? what is your plan? you know, are you about this? and then there's money issue, you know, wouldn't go 200 now 300 grand into debt to go anywhere there are market signals if you can't get money from a place that's that you want to go to, then you probably ought not go there. but and then there are other considerations like what exactly do you want to do? like my you know, when i got at

least a master's, maybe even a doctorate crisis management through through my experience here the the troubles as some of my friends call it. and one of the things i learned is goal setting is so again, your strategy depends on what goal you set. so do want to work at a big firm in new york? no, you really don't want to do that do you want to be involved in a presidential administration in, washington? do you want to practice international law in latin america be based in miami? do you want to go back to your mid-sized city, hometown and kind of work there maybe eventually get into politics or just kind of a civic leader there? you know, if you do, you want to become a prosecutor. the answers to these quite you want to be a professor. all of those questions plus the money will affect your decision making matrix just as much as well. what inspires latest free speech rankings, things like that. but i can tell you the so-called, you know, elite schools, it's it's slim pickings where i would say that things are good, you know, chicago,

which i might biased because i went there, is really dedicated to this stuff. they've kind of gone away faculty ideological diversity of late in part because some other schools have picked up people but that's a that's a good place. you know, uva has had a mixed record. the university as a whole has had a pretty not very but the law school's been been decent. um, i don't know. you know. at the end of the day, these rankings are artificial as well, you know, i don't know what, who's ranked 13th versus 17th. why does matter or you know 20th versus 30th if you're want to practice in georgia, you know go to the atlanta school rather than, you know, university of iowa or alabama. that's ranked higher than university of georgia or something like that. so the one thing will say before we environment questions is the book was released, i think it was on january 14th and under

stand you're doing some some other speaking events for that some people who want to hear more can access podcasts and perhaps some other speaking absolutely if you look at my my substack, i called shapiro's gavel. i wrote up the first month and a half of my schedule, one of my last posts. so you can kind of follow me around there. but yeah, there's i think already videos and certainly audio podcasts around that. i'm happy to have you to chat, drop me a line on how you can follow me on twitter at i. shapiro you can figure out my email that's a that's a test for would be lawyers if you can't figure out my email then you know i don't know. all right. well thanks very much for your comments and observations and and for sharing your thoughts about the book. let's now open it up to audience questions. why don't we start right here in front of me? what do you think? i mean, i'm sorry.

i think you. thanks for coming these for speaking was just wondering does accreditation have a place in this at all? and if so i swear i didn't plant this question, this is the least sexy of this whole thing. and it's dry. and it's it's boring. there's only one accreditor of law schools in the entire country, and that's the american bar association. i've chapter about the aba and how it's gone downhill. i mean, can you imagine just over 50 years ago, lewis powell parlayed his presidency of the aba into joining the supreme court. now, i mean, if you're a lawyer you know, jeff, do you know who the president of the aba is? i don't it's just not it's not an important position. it's just one more left wing activist, one more pressure group, doesn't i think 17% of lawyers are members or something like that. it's it's a problem. so one very easy thing you know, a lot of bang for the buck would be this new education department to simply remove the

accreditation monopoly. when we come over over here. hi. thank for coming to speak to us today. i was wondering what you think of the outside and do you feel like it's a good method for students to get into law school? the lsat, like the s.a.t. for undergrad is is a leveling test it allows you to measure. well what does that inflated? you know, 4.2 gpa at princeton compared to some kid like number one in his class at university of oklahoma. but they don't give bonuses. you know, they don't they don't give a pluses or whatever the case might be. how do you evaluate how do you compare their education in law school? it might be even more the lsat versus the sat for undergrad because it tests logical reasoning. what you can learn, by the way, you know that game section which might have gone away now i don't know. they keep fiddling with it but you know, reading, comprehend

asian vocabulary, logic, these are very important to law schools and there's a great correlation in terms of the grades that you get in law school with lsat score. so yeah, after a brief pause during the pandemic, i think almost all law schools have gone back to it. and that's that's a good thing. well, over here. thanks there's been a lot of talk lately. i just thinking a bit more broadly than necessarily law schools but there's been a lot of talk lately, especially since the inauguration that, you know, the tide has turned on a lot of this stuff on i on so-called woke culture a morning do you think that's actually true and to what extent for example, you know if someone made that tweet from three years ago today, do you think they would be subject to the same response? well, there's multiple going on here. there's kind of what's going on in society more broadly worse. clearly, there's been what gets

called a lot now a vibe shift. you know as instantiated in the election as kind of a pushback to some weirdness and craziness whether in corporate america or or elsewhere. then there's the side and, you know, these executive orders are amazing and surprising and kind of the neutral senses of terms. i mean, it's more than i thought what happened certainly much better lawyered than the early days of the trump administration years ago. you know, if anyone predicted that not only would trump rescind biden's dui executive orders, but lyndon johnson's affirmative action executive, i mean, go take that to stock market, that prognostication skill. so so you know but but you mere orders is not enough you see

lots institutions merely their offices are moving people around are not really changing things you see, especially in higher ed, there's you know, massive resistance to these kinds of changes. and it'll take enforcement by the education department, by the. department of justice, civil rights division, state attorneys general. you know, in texas, texas, florida, we're one of the early adopters of abolishing dui bureaucracies. again, nothing to do with professors or professors saying class or what courses they teach. but just these non-teaching things. and yet a lot schools have just kind of played shuffling game. so it's, you know, the price of liberty sanity in this case is eternal vigilance. vigilance or two. to quote churchill, this isn't the end. it's not even the beginning of the end. it might be the end of the beginning. so i'll come here second. but we have one online question that wanted to share.

somebody has asked with regard to the federal who are boycotting from certain law schools, are other students from law schools urging their to make changes so their their reputation, their school or their success as as students at those schools isn't tainted by their peers and own opportunities. limited i've heard about alumni making such comments to their deans, especially young alumni who obviously have the most to gain or lose from the reputation their diploma because of course as you on in your career you know where you went matters less and less. i don't know about current students exactly. i you know if the boycott works and making students cognizant of these things and the students that you know at the margins affected and they're deciding not to go to those schools, then presumably that means there will be less feedback from current students. but i don't i don't know

specifically. right here. there's been a lot of conversations about how the right has responded to all of this on the title six front with regard to anti-semitism in particular. and i think many free speech absolutists on the right have reevaluated that position as a result of the sort of. i would can call maybe a culture of violence that has animated these campuses that's been sort of stoked by faculty etc. and i wonder where do you think the line should be drawn and do we pose a in slipping down kind of a similar title nine you know well rabbit hole in the title six direction in the coming future. i also did not plant that question but it's an important i'm not for merely adding anti-semitism the list of progressive you know protected categories restructuring the

intersectional matrix to protect -- better and things like that no it's from it's a quota of a line from a movie from gosh 40 years ago, war games, the only way to win is to not play. so you don't get into these, you know, victimhood olympics, what have you. and as to the, you know, the speech versus other stuff, you know, speech, violence. i wrote an for the free press in november of 2023. that was to be originally they commissioned an op ed. it ballooned into this 2500 word piece, which i think still holds up about kind of different buckets. first, first of all, speech, things that aren't speech, you know even if it's expressive, it isn't speech. there's one example. somebody's urine aided on a hillel jewish student organization and claimed the defense that, well, they're just being expressive now sorry no if you you know beat somebody up because you like their political views, i don't care that you're politically motivated know that might even enhance your your sentence because of these hate crime rules and things that so you know not speech then there

is protected speech right true. death threats or you know child, which we're not talking about in this circumstance or intimidation or harassment. you know, it's one thing to kind of in the middle, a public park, public square, you know, say things quite another to like march down to again, the hillel or a jewish student dorm and start shouting things and, you know, things like that or incite direct incitement of violence and what that is. and there's a lot of supreme court jurisprudence over that. and there's time, place, manner, restrictions. so just like for expressive value. you can't just block a highway or, a street to make your point. well, you can because there's lack of will by political leaders in blue and cities. but the law says can't that that's not protected. you know i can't go to your neighborhood in the middle the night and with a bullhorn. tell you exactly what i think of donald trump and joe biden or something like that. right time, place and manner on

campus. that means you can't disrupt classes student organization events, you know, blocking access to buildings, all these kinds of rules that, say that there are limits. you know, it's not an absolute test, you know, you know, even the most absolutist absolute it recognizes that there's limits in in certain circumstance. so we have to fine tune those kinds of understandings. and so it's not a matter of, you know, punishing people who have the wrong views, whether those views be, you know, anti semitism, racism, anti-catholic bigotry, what have you. it's what you do with those views. you know, are you harassing, intimidating and you know, is a big debate about what the harassment standard should be. for those of you who are interested in the legal details, the data standard is very good and should be should be pursued. but but anyway, it's a it's a nuanced question question. it's like we have time for. one more. so let's take this gentleman in the back low for help. have i got this right?

yeah. for those who would like to see healthy change of the things you're talking about, there's a school of thought. i think that the legacy institutions the harvard's the yale's the stanford are too far gone to be saved. and i think neil ferguson has said things like that although he said them a while ago maybe before the hamas change some people's thinking the question is whether reforming the old institutions is worth the effort or whether creating new institutions means. the university of austin is a paradigm would be a better way to go. the answer is yes i'm for all of the above. we never know what's going to be successful in what way. i just spoke at the university of austin friday night. just amazing. it's they just admitted their first class. so it's all freshmen right now this and next year at least it's

going to be, you know, free tuition for who go. they're very entrepreneurial. have this thing called the austin union kind of the oxford union or the yale political union these sorts of things debate society. you know, very, very organized. and so all all luck to them. similarly, there have been centers and institutes in existing schools. arizona state and florida, university of florida, other places ironically these you know, to instill critical thinking and civics and rigor, know the sorts of things that the rest of the institution has failed in. so that's too hard to do. those sorts things with law schools because again, the accreditation cartel but university of austin thinking about starting a law school eventually so again i'm for all of the above let in that context let a lot of 100 flowers bloom. all right. well, with that, let us, thank our guest ilya shapiro, author of lawless. we appreciate your being