Lawless

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

When protestors at Columbia broke into a build­ing and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.” At Stanford, chanting activists, egged on by an associate dean, drove away a federal judge. Yale’s hostility to free speech led more than a dozen federal judges to boycott the school for clerkship hiring.

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect oppo­nents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. And yet, rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will hold impor-tant government positions, fight constitutional lawsuits, and advise Fortune 500 companies.

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institu­tional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investi­gation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be sub­ject to the inquisition again. Not being able to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the warping of higher ed—and especially the illib­eral takeover of legal education—is transforming our country. We’re handing the reins of power to lawless radicals who will be America’s future judges, prosecu­tors, politicians, and presidents. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.