I remember how it was -- JR
Judge Kyle Duncan Gives Free Speech Lecture at Notre Dame After Being Shouted Down at Stanford
A U.S. judge delivered a speech at a university on March 24, a few weeks after students and a top staffer prevented him from doing so at Stanford University.
U.S. District Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee, told listeners at the University of Notre Dame that there’s a “vital tradition of free speech in this country” and that students have the right to protest him.
“It’s a great country, where you can harshly criticize federal judges and nothing bad will happen to you. You might even get praised or promoted,” he said. “But make no mistake. What went on in that classroom on March the ninth had nothing to do with our proud American tradition of free speech. It was rather a parody of it.”
Duncan started to deliver a lecture at Stanford Law School earlier in March when students began heckling him so loudly that he was unable to continue.
Multiple staff members did not intervene.
Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez later said the way the event unfolded “was not aligned with our institutional commitment to freedom of speech.”
After blowback from some students and staffers over her statement, Martinez offered a lengthy letter reiterating her stance. She noted that protests are allowed, but not ones that disrupt events.
“The president of the university and I have apologized to Judge Duncan for a very simple reason–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,” Martinez said.
She said that the apology, and the policy it defended, was “fully consistent” with the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and that apology, and the policy it defends, is fully consistent with the First Amendment, which protects the right to free speech, and California’s Leonard Law, which bars private colleges from imposing rules that would curtail First Amendment rights.
Students calling for officials to restrict the Federalist Society, which hosted Duncan, and the speakers the organization can invite to campus “are demanding action inconsistent not only with freedom of speech but with rights to freedom of association that civil rights lawyers fought hard in the twentieth century to secure,” Martinez added later.
Philip Munoz, a professor in political science and a law school professor at Notre Dame who invited Duncan to talk after the disrupted Stanford event, opened by telling attendees not to interrupt the judge.
“Notre Dame is especially good at doing free speech,” he said.
Duncan said that most federal judges are reclusive and he accepted the invitation due to the “unusual event” at Stanford. Munoz, he said, “promised I wouldn’t be silenced during this talk.”
‘Not Free Speech to Silence Others’
Duncan, after praising Martinez’s apology and new letter, said that the Stanford students weren’t engaging in free speech when they prevented him from speaking.
“It is not free speech to silence others because you hate them. It is not free speech to tear and heckle a speaker who has been invited to your school so that he can’t deliver a talk. It is not free speech to form a mob and hurl taunts and threats that aren’t worthy of being written on the wall of a public toilet. It is not free speech to pretend to be harmed by words or ideas you disagree with, and then use that feigned harm as a license to deny a speaker the most rudimentary forms of civility,” Duncan said.
“Some of the students were apparently convinced that what they were doing was, ‘counter speech.’ Wrong. Counter speech means offering a reasoned response to an argument. It doesn’t mean screaming ‘Shut up, you scum we hate you,’ at a distance of 12 feet. Other students claimed this was nothing more than the ‘marketplace of ideas in action,’ again, wrong. The marketplace of ideas describes a free and fair competition among opposing arguments, with the most compelling one we hope emerging on the top. What transpired at Stanford was no marketplace. It was more like a flash mob on a shoplifting spree.”
The students that attended the talk to protest “had no interest in my talk at all,” the judge said. “They were there to heckle and to cheer and to shame.” What was carried out amounted to intimidation, he added.
“And to be clear, not intimidating me. I’m not intimidated by any of this. I’m a life tenure judge. I’m going to go back to my court and keep writing opinions,” he said. “No, the target of the intimidation was the protesters’ fellow students. The message could not have been clearer, ‘woe to you if you represent the kind of clients that Judge Duncan represented, or you take the same views that he has.'”
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Judge Deals Blow to Regents’ Scheme Against NYC Jewish schools
A trial court at Albany, after a battle between yeshivas and New York’s department of education, ruled that new regulations governing yeshivas had gone too far in their prescription for schools that didn’t meet their standards.
The regulations would have closed down Orthodox Jewish schools whose secular offerings the state deemed insufficient, forcing parents to transfer their children. Fervently Orthodox Jews across the state challenged such rules as a violation of their First Amendment right to religious free exercise.
Judge Christina Ryba shrank from the First Amendment challenge, but ruled that such penalties for violating the state regulations were beyond the scope of the mandate given to regulators.
The Agudath Israel of America, America’s largest grass roots organization representing fervently religious Jews, said in a statement that Thursday’s ruling provided “important protections for Orthodox Jewish education in New York.”
“While not the complete victory many were praying for, Agudath Israel is grateful that the court recognized the egregious overreach the Regulations sought,” the Agudah said in its statement. “The prospect of forcibly shutting down schools, and of the state mandating which schools children should be re-enrolled to, is not something one would typically associate with 21st century America.”
The regulations, first adopted this fall, set forth a framework in which non-public schools were to be evaluated in accordance with the state’s compulsory education law — which requires all students receive instruction that is “substantially equivalent” to the education given in their public counterparts.
In October, yeshiva advocates and organizations representing the Orthodox Jewish community banded together in a lawsuit against the regulators, alleging that the new rules “single out yeshivas” for evaluations under greater scrutiny.
The regulations offered schools several mechanisms by which to prove they were “substantially equivalent” — Regents examinations, accreditation, international baccalaureate programs, among others.
The Orthodox Jewish institutions of learning were the only group of non-public schools that did not fall neatly into one of the “pathways” and would therefore be subject to regular review by local public school districts.
After review, if schools failed to meet the standards set forth by the local school district, they would be given an amnesty period in which they would be required to shift their curricular offerings — possibly to include even profane subjects that some believe their religion prohibits them from teaching to their children.
If a school failed to meet standards after additional review, the school would be shut down, and parents whose children continued to attend could face jail time.
In Thursday’s ruling, following oral arguments earlier this month, Judge Christine Ryba struck down the penalties for schools found to be in violation of substantial equivalency — penalties that, she said, were outside the scope of the state’s compulsory education law.
Judge Ryba noted that the burden of the compulsory education law falls on parents — not schools. The state, therefore, has no compelling interest in closing a school that fails to meet substantial equivalence.
Judge Ryba also noted that parents may not be relying on the school to fulfill the law’s requirements. If a school falls short of meeting requirements, it is not necessarily true that a child’s education is not substantially equivalent to that of a public school.
“Rather, the parents should be given a reasonable opportunity to prove that the substantial equivalency requirements for their children’s education are satisfied by instruction provided through a combination of sources,” Judge Ryba wrote.
In her ruling, the judge wrote that the Regents “lack authority” to enforce punitive measures on schools. Judge Ryba wrote that it was beyond the scope of the Regents’ mandate to “direct parents to completely unenroll their children from nonpublic schools” and “to direct the closure of such schools.”
The ruling, for the time being, preserves the autonomy of parochial and independent schools who are no longer at risk of closure for failure to comply with the regulatory regime.
The court, however, dismissed the constitutional merits of the case — saying the rules were “entirely neutral” and that the plaintiffs did not merit an injunction on First Amendment grounds.
The plaintiffs had alleged that the regulations constitute an “invasive secular oversight” that threatens to “hamper and interfere with religious education,” which Judge Ryba dismissed.
If, however, the regulations are applied unevenly upon yeshivas, the judge left open the possibility of an “as-applied” free exercise challenge.
https://www.nysun.com/article/judge-deals-blow-to-regents-scheme-against-yeshivas
**********************************************‘No Legitimate Basis’ for DOJ Targeting of Protesting Parents, House Panel’s Report Concludes
A House committee has found that there was “no legitimate basis” for the Biden administration to use Justice Department resources to target supposed “threats” to school boards across the country.
“From the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas, it is apparent that the Biden administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes,” the House Judiciary Committee report concludes.
For those who have followed this story, the conclusion of the report, released on Tuesday, might seem obvious, but it’s still important to catalog how government agencies have been weaponized for partisan ends.
In 2021, a series of protests erupted at Virginia school board meetings due to the adoption of the teaching of critical race theory, as well as transgender policies and COVID-19 restrictions.
Parents were fed up with radical policies being foisted on their children and showed up en masse at school board meetings to voice their concerns. The trend repeated itself across the country, but it was particularly noteworthy in Virginia due to the tightly contested governor’s race at the time between a former governor, Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, seeking to return to office, and the eventual winner, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.
McAuliffe went with the campaign message of what amounted to “sit down and shut up, let the experts—well, actually self-interested teachers unions—do whatever they want with your children.”
It wasn’t a winning strategy.
While the race was ongoing and parents were showing up at meetings, Attorney General Merrick Garland released a memo calling for a Justice Department investigation into “threats” to local school boards, despite having no evidence that any such danger existed. That followed a National School Boards Association letter to President Joe Biden asking for the administration to crack down on parents.
The House report found that the Justice Department’s “own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof.”
What it looked like was a highly partisan operation to smear domestic political opponents as criminals and terrorists and to scare parents away from exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.
Democracy is a threat to democracy, you see. That appears to be a favorite tactic for Biden, our great uniter-in-chief.
On top of the partisan interest in silencing parents, Garland appeared to have a conflict of interest, as his son-in-law was running a multimillion-dollar operation to bring “culturally responsive training” to Virginia schools.
The House Judiciary Committee report concluded that the Biden administration’s goal seemed to have been “silencing the critics of its radical education policies and neutralizing an issue that was threatening Democrat Party prospects in the close gubernatorial race in Virginia.”
It did so with little pretense. In fact, the report concluded that the Biden administration unleashed the Justice Department to simply “quell swelling discord over controversial education curricula and unpopular school board decisions.”
“This weaponization of law-enforcement powers against American parents exercising their First Amendment rights is dangerous,” the report said. “The Justice Department subjected moms and dads to the opening of an FBI investigation about them, the establishment of an FBI case file that includes their political views, and the application of a ‘threat tag’ to their names as a direct result of their exercise of their fundamental constitutional right to speak and advocate for their children.”
So, the next question is: What will the House do, given the evidence that the administration is using federal agencies to assault the constitutionally protected rights of American citizens? The FBI seems to have been thoroughly politicized, but the problem seems to be bigger than any single agency.
The report said that the committee will continue investigating the matter. That’s good, but the American people need to be assured that this sort of abuse will be corrected and won’t happen again.
At the very least, Republicans in Congress should be doing everything they can to prevent the expansion of other agencies. One of the biggest concerns about the massive IRS expansion is how it will be used to harass and threaten the average American.
After all, an administration that’s spent the past few years spending huge sums of money we don’t have has every reason to shake down Americans and get them to pay more than they owe. In using the Justice Department for its own partisan ends, shouldn’t we expect this administration to use other agencies in a similar manner?
The Garland memo represented the predictable intersectionality of ideological enforcement and partisan—and perhaps even personal—interests.
This type of governance is common in Communist China, where you can have your tyranny pure. We used to expect better in the United States.
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