American Bar Association Considers New Academic Freedom Standards After Judge Heckled At Stanford Law
Kate Anderson on August 17, 2023
The American Bar Association (ABA) is considering a proposal that may require law schools to prohibit behavior that “hinders free expression,” according to a memo from the ABA’s Strategic Review Committee (SRC).
The SRC is the ABA’s accreditation wing and introduced the changes after multiple schools dealt with large, disruptive protests, notably at Stanford Law School where hundreds of students drowned out an event with conservative Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan. The SRC’s proposal notes that the changes would “protect the right” to discuss topics that are “controversial or unpopular.”
“Protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular, including through robust debate, demonstrations, or protests; and proscribe disruptive conduct that hinders free expression by preventing or substantially interfering with the carrying out of law school functions or approved activities, such as classes, meetings, interviews, ceremonies, and public events,” the proposal reads.
The committee has been weighing the effectiveness of the existing Standard 405, which “requires a law school to have ‘an established and announced policy with respect to academic freedom and tenure’” but does not make any other mention of free speech, according to the proposal. SRC attempted to pass revisions in 2022 but later withdrew them before coming up with the current changes in Section 208.
SRC noted that the Stanford incident had taken place “in the background” during the process of drafting the proposal. The California university was the latest in a slew of incidents at prominent law schools across the country.
Over 100 students at Yale Law School attempted to shout down a discussion during a panel event on civil liberty in March 2022, arguing one of the speakers Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom, was targeting “trans kids. In the same month at the University of California Hastings College of Law, students heckled Ilya Shapiro, attorney and senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, during his discussion about the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The ABA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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