Myth: Yale Law School is a Liberal Bastion

Let’s question the myth that universities are bubbles where only liberal thought is given credence.

Brett Kavanaugh has two degrees from Yale—a baccalaureate and a law degree. He appears to have attended law school with Kris Kobach, a Yale Law grad who is the Republican nominee for Kansas governor. He is to the right on immigration and voter ID compared to Donald Trump. (Kobach was recently held in contempt of court recently for failing to heed a court order to not purge Kansas voter rolls ... Trump has not been held in contempt of court for anything).

Kobach has spent his legal career finding ways to “self-deport” unlawful immigrants, drafting a model bill that required public school children to provide birth certificates as a condition for enrolling in school each fall.

Kobach didn’t get those ideas from liberal professors at Yale. He probably got the idea from a prominent anti-immigration Yale law professor, and former dean, Peter Schuck. 

Schuck makes the argument that the 14^th Amendment did not create birthright citizenship (it did)—he says that the nation must consent to this idea (we did, when the 14^th Amendment was enacted in 1868).

Let’s also stop with the nonsense that the left is intolerant and the right is a place for free speech. 

In a New York Times article published on September 9, 2010, Clarence Thomas was quoted: “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me. It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.” 

The article also pointed out that “Thomas apparently has one additional requirement. Without exception, the 84 clerks he has chosen over his two decades on the court all first trained with an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.” Check it out here: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/us/politics/07clerks.html?pagewanted=all

Finally, take a close look at the chart at the top. It presents a Politics 538 article that explained research on elite law schools that place clerks in top-tier federal courts. The author of the study, Dahlia Lithwick, wrote that clerks from “Harvard and Yale fall very near the ideological center. But, interestingly, those distributions are strongly bimodal, with peaks left and right of center. This points to both a strong left and a strong right contingent of clerks from these schools. The same is true of other schools — Stanford and Chicago, for example — but those are more right-leaning in general.” For more. Click here: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-conservative-and-most-liberal-elite-law-schools/

What to think about this? Elite law schools are incubators for conservatives and liberals. Just look at the current members of the Supreme Court. Every one of them graduated either from Harvard or Yale. Four are conservative; four are liberal.