Law students at America's top universities, the nation's future lawyers, are learning to abandon the Constitution in their programs of study.
In fact, according to The Epoch Times, two prominent researchers of conservative think tanks argue that Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, among other law institutions, are being infiltrated by academic concepts of the radical left, and in doing so, they actively promote the desire to get rid of the Constitution to their students.
"In almost every state, law students who pass their state bar examination, which allows them to practice law, take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution," the conservative newspaper article reads. "But the country's top law schools teach future lawyers and judges the opposite. Many now teach that the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the nation since its ratification in 1788, is broken and should be scrapped."
J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and Hans von Spakovsky, jurist at the Edwin Meese III Center of the Heritage Foundation, both former Justice Department attorneys, spoke with The Epoch Times and explained how these powers are going head-on against the U.S. Constitution.
"They're saying they want to get rid of the Constitution—they're making no secret about it," Adams said. "The stuff they're teaching now is straight-up Marxist. There's a big difference from just 10 years ago."
The Epoch Times article cites a 2022 article published in The New York Times by professors Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, of Harvard and Yale, respectively.
The editorial, titled "The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed," argues that the founding text is "inadequate," "undemocratic" and should be abandoned.
"The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism," reads the opinion piece.
Attorney von Spakovsky explained that the idea that the American Constitution is oppressive comes from radical concepts such as critical race theory (CRT), widely promoted by radical left-wing groups and liberal academics who argue that the United States is an essentially racist and oppressive country.
"[CRT defends the idea that] our Constitution is a patriarchal, oppressive document used to suppress minorities and just about everyone else," von Spakovsky said. "And we are supposedly a systematically racist, misogynist society, and these law students need to go out and preach and practice revolution."
Openly progressive classes and riots against conservative voices
The idea that radical ideas have infiltrated U.S. law schools is embodied in student political activism and curricula.
For example, in a series of research articles, Adams denounces that classes such as "Decentralized Resistance" and "Law and Inequality" are held at Yale University.
The latter explores "inequality along lines of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class," Adams explains.
The first teaches that small acts of resistance can generate "quasi-revolutionary" movements and changes.
For von Spakovsky, this type of class, in short, seeks to train lawyers, prosecutors and ideological judges who seek to "do justice" under subjective moral parameters without respecting what the laws dictate.
"What they want is lawyers and judges who simply decide cases based on ideology, not on the law," von Spakovsky argued, later explaining that progressive student activism also shows strong contempt for the First Amendment.
In particular, the renowned lawyer cited cancel culture, censorship on social media platforms and the rise of activists who manage to block speakers as evidence that the left in the United States does not respect free expression.
"They literally equate words with violence. So if you are expressing any kind of opinions that they disagree with [they argue that] you don't have a First Amendment right to engage in that kind of speech because it suppresses minorities and others," von Spakovsky explained.
The Epoch Times cited a case that generated controversy in March when the Stanford chapter of the Federalist Society invited 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus.
"While he tried to deliver his speech, a mob of about 100 students heckled and shouted him down while faculty members did nothing. And some encouraged the students. Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to address the hecklers," the newspaper read. "Instead, Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law School's associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, took to the podium, scolding the conservative judge for the 'harm' he inflicted with his rulings."
The bigotry against Duncan was because, in 2020, the judge refused to allow an inmate convicted of possessing child pornography, who identified as transgender, to change his pronouns to female.
The judge eventually had to be escorted out of the facility due to the riots.
Stanford Law students shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan while he was trying to speak.
When he asked for an administrator to control the situation, Stanford’s “associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion” got up and lectured him for nearly 10 minutes pic.twitter.com/tjlUPOIMmQ
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) March 11, 2023
For conservative lawyers, this practice, in addition to the central idea of abandoning respect for the Constitution, represents a threat to freedom never seen before in the United States.
