Trump-appointed federal judges pledge boycott of Stanford students after 'intellectual terrorism' scandal

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Stanford Law dean defends First Amendment on campus after students shout down speaker


Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro says free speech norms, professional responsibility and civil discourse are ‘very, very important,’ particularly for law students. 

Circuit court judges appointed by former President Trump plan to refuse hiring Stanford Law graduates following a scandal in which students verbally harassed a federal judge who was brought in as a guest speaker, according to a Saturday announcement. 

Judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fifth and Eleventh circuits, Judge James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, respectively, announced they would not hire future Stanford students to clerk for them, similarly to what they did last year with Yale law, the Washington Free Beacon reported. 

"We’re not teaching the basic terms of our democracy," Judge Ho said at a banquet for the Texas Review of Law and Politics. "Our Nation’s law schools are failing this basic standard. 

"I worry they’re making the world a worse place," Judge Ho continued. "It’s not a coincidence that the worst disruptions typically occur at the worst schools when it comes to one critically important metric: intellectual diversity on the faculty and in the administration."

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Federal judges pledging not to hire Stanford students for clerkships. (Getty. | Wikimedia Commons)

Protests broke out on March 9 at Stanford when Judge Kyle Duncan, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, was invited to speak by conservative organization called the Federalist Society. Students shouted at him, preventing him from delivering his planned talk. 

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The students reportedly called Duncan "scum," asked sexual questions and said, "We hope your daughters get raped." 

Judge Ho criticized Stanford for refusing to bring disciplinary action against the students. 

"The problem is that these rules aren’t enforced. Students disrupt without consequence. Administrators tolerate or even encourage the chaos," he said. "Is it really that close of a call—whether it’s okay to call for someone to be raped? Do these future leaders really not have fair notice that they shouldn’t ridicule a judge’s sex life? I’m all for second chances. But I’m not a schmuck."

Tirien Steinbach, the Stanford University Law School associate dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, slams U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kyle Duncan during his presentation at the school as an invited guest on March 9, 2023. (Screenshot/ Vimeo - Ethics and Public Policy Center)

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Among the protesters' complaints was how Duncan refused to use a transgender sex offender's preferred pronouns in a 2020 opinion. 

"So what do we do about it?" Judge Ho said. "Well, ask yourself this: What do elite law schools do when they conclude that institutions are failing them? Yale recently called for a boycott of the U.S. News and World Report. And numerous schools have followed suit. Well, imagine that every judge who says they’re opposed to discrimination at Yale and Stanford takes the same path. Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire from those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools would stop discriminating then?

"We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future," Judge Ho concluded. 

Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne ultimately apologized to Duncan "to acknowledge that his speech was disrupted in ways that undermined his ability to deliver the remarks he wanted to give to audience members who wanted to hear them, as a result of the failure to ensure that the university’s disruption policies were followed."

The president of the Stanford Federalist Society, Tim Rosenberger, said, "A lot of us who worked very hard to get to Stanford are kind of feeling like suckers right now. But you get here, you experience this, you see that there’s a mob, there’s a way you’re expected to think."

Tim Rosenberger is president of the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society, which invited Judge Kyle Duncan to speak earlier this month. (Fox News Digital)

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"You might have thought the law school was to teach you how to debate with people, and how to make an argument. But in fact, it turns out it’s to teach you how to think a very particular way, to hold a certain set of beliefs. And if you don’t want to do that, then maybe these elite schools are not for you," he said. 

Fox News' Emma Colton and Joe Silverstein contributed to this report.