by Teresa T. Manning
Elite law schools churn out activists who shout down dissent, proving that legal education has traded the rule of law for ideological theater.
Last week, UCLA law students shouted profanities, held signs with graphic obscenities, and booed a Department of Homeland Security attorney invited to campus to speak by the law school’s Federalist Society chapter. Video shows a crowded hallway where students scream at the lawyer when he arrives and then continue howling and jeering in the lecture room, which has perhaps 50 students, plus a few older attendees as well as security guards in back. Students also hold up vulgar signs—“F–k You Loser” “How’s Trump’s C–k Taste?”—and make vulgar gestures while grinning and giggling. They slouch, put their feet on desks, stand up and sit down repeatedly, and let their phones ring to disrupt the presentation. The older audience members look annoyed and exasperated.
What a zoo.
This circus atmosphere sadly confirms the anti-intellectual wasteland that much of American higher education has become, with law schools no exception. Many seem more fit for spoiled toddlers than serious students.
Unfortunately, the temper tantrum shout down seems almost a new normal in much of American legal education: In 2022, law students at Yale blew horns, stomped their feet, and shouted obscenities at Alliance Defending Freedom counsel Kristen Waggoner and Yale law professor Kate Stith, who was trying to moderate the event—which was on free speech, no less—and who told the students to “grow up.” Then again, in 2023, Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit tried to speak at Stanford Law School but was similarly heckled by angry students—who called him a racist, of course—and was then even scolded by a school administrator who not only did not bring order but said she was uncomfortable with the judge’s presence, not with the presence of angry, frothing students. Similar law school incidents have occurred at Cornell, Georgetown, the City University of New York, and the University of California Hastings.
When will Congress and state legislatures stop funding these insane asylums masquerading as places of learning?
Law students are actually older than the average undergraduate, since law schools require admittees to already have a BA. That would put them at between 21 and 25 years of age. But their behavior is anything but adult. Are they products of modern homes where smartphones and computers displace conversation and basic child-rearing? Perhaps. But it’s also likely that law schools prefer activist students over those with moral characteristics such as self-restraint. After all, law school faculty and administrators are themselves mostly left-wing activists. More than 95 percent of law professors are registered Democrats, according to a National Association of Scholars legal brief and “the ideological median is . . . not just left of center, but closer to the left edge of the Democrat party . . . many are further left than that,” says one Georgetown faculty member. Typical publications include titles such as Taxing Lesbians and A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto.
Worse, law students are supposed to be preparing for the legal profession and the justice system, where words, debate, and argument should replace physical threats, intimidation, and incivility. Yet law students increasingly reject discourse in favor of shout downs.
Disagreements and disputes could be—and often have been—settled by intimidation or force, whether shouting or feuds or duels. But the law is supposed to transcend all that. The legal system is designed to unearth facts and air arguments to get at the truth and in the process do justice. Students who prefer shout downs and noisy protests should be in the streets, not part of a legal system and not in legal education.
Not incidentally, courtrooms do not tolerate such antics. “Order in the court!” is a well-known phrase, and flouting this judicial directive is a crime called “contempt of court.” Classrooms and lecture halls should be run on the same principles as a courtroom. Serious business can’t be done in chaos. And neither can serious learning.
Notably, most of these law school incidents are at Federalist Society events. The Federalist Society started in 1982 to provide a home for law students and faculty who believed in the rule of law, not the politicization of the law. That such a society was needed already says something. It has since become highly regarded among non-left-wing attorneys and within Washington, DC, legal and public policy circles. It has also vetted many judicial nominees for President Trump.
But in the law school space, it has barely made a dent. Law schools might allow one or two Republican professors on faculty (who tend to be Federalist Society members), but the agreement seems to be that they not rock the boat and not bring in more dissidents. Legal education, like almost all of American higher education, is viewed by the Left as their territory—indeed, as prime real estate for the transmission of their ideology. This turf belongs to the radicals. Real thinkers—much less real lawyers—need not apply.
Indeed, most law professors aren’t lawyers in the ordinary sense of the word. Most have never tried a case or argued an appeal or even represented a client. They may have law degrees (actually, they also may not) but their real job appears to be to lecture and publish on their pet political projects.
It wasn’t always this way.
In the 1950s, real lawyers taught at law schools in the morning and attended to their private practice and their clients in the afternoon. Law schools were state-based because legal codes, case law, and bar exams were state-based. And law students were expected to behave like the officers of the court they would soon be—solicitors, barristers, prosecutors, and judges.
No such standards now.
The students at UCLA and other dystopian law schools should probably leave America and the West to see how the rest of the world resolves disputes. That would be a far better education.
Tribal warfare is the default in much of the Middle East, Africa, and Central America. China notoriously has a surveillance state with little regard for individual rights and liberties. Authoritarian regimes such as those of the former Soviet Union would often shoot people who simply tried to leave. In short, when people disagree, intimidation and the threat of violence and warfare are always lurking. A legal system is supposed to prevent that and be better than that. But legal systems, like all systems, are only as good as the people in them.
These are basics lost on our young people—including our law students, products of American miseducation.
* * *
Teresa R. Manning is Policy Director at the National Association
of Scholars, President of the Virginia Association of Scholars, and a
former law professor at Virginia’s Scalia Law School, George Mason
University.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/30/ucla-law-school-or-preschool-toddler-like-law-students-should-leave-america-for-a-real-education/
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