Judge James C. Ho, a Trump appointee who serves the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, has announced that he will no longer consider students from Yale Law School for clerkships. (Ho, moreover, is not alone, as the above article indicates.)
Ho’s reason? Ho states that Yale Law School not only “tolerates” cancel culture, but “actively practices it.”
That may be true. Yale University, along with the rest of the Ivy League, is only slightly less ideological than the East German institution that used to train members of that country’s secret police, or Stasi.
Stupidity emanating from Yale students is so common now, that poking fun at them has become something of a turkey shoot. In 2015, protests famously erupted on the Yale campus over Halloween costumes and cultural appropriation. But that’s only the beginning.
While I understand Ho’s sentiment, his gesture will likely become but one more salvo in the ideological boycott wars. For one thing: it is easy to imagine left-leaning judges (who outnumber conservative ones in most states) responding in kind.
We might argue that Judge Ho is taking the wrong approach entirely. Nothing so hobbles the intellectual capacities of a young person than to graduate from any school in the Ivy League in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Yale Law School students need nothing so much as some sane, balancing influences. Who better to provide that, than a judge who disagrees with most of their professors?
-ET