Yale turns

Yale turns on Kavanaugh

A school long known as a breeding ground for activists has emerged as the epicenter of the Kavanaugh resistance.

By ELIANA JOHNSON

When Yale Law School put out a news release this summer congratulating Brett Kavanaugh, class of 1990, on his nomination to the Supreme Court, hundreds of students and alums expressed outrage.

In an open letter, they blasted the institution for praising Kavanaugh’s professionalism and service to the law school while overlooking what they described as “the true stakes of his nomination.”

“Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?” they wrote, describing Kavanaugh’s nomination as an “emergency” and a threat to “democratic life.”

The law school, among the nation’s most prestigious, had issued similar pro forma statements congratulating other prominent alumni on their accomplishments, including Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when she was nominated to the high court by President Barack Obama in 2009.

But the protest elicited by the anodyne statement about Kavanaugh’s nomination was a preview of what was to come. In recent weeks, a school long known as a breeding ground for activists has emerged as the epicenter of the Kavanaugh resistance.

Yale’s role in the Kavanaugh story goes all the way back to 1982, when the law school hosted a three-day symposium that gave birth to The Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that has been influential in shifting the country’s judiciary to the right. It was The Federalist Society, which boasts ties to four of the nine Supreme Court justices, that gave President Donald Trump the list of potential nominees from which Kavanaugh was selected.

A resulting irony is that, while Kavanaugh’s Yale pedigree was a key reason Trump tapped him for the high court, his years as an undergraduate there have become a source of heated controversy — including allegations of sexual misconduct by a fellow student, Deborah Ramirez — and the current student body at the law school, which is more attuned to politics, a locus of major protest against his nomination.

"What gives it a special turn of the screw is that he’s a double Yalie and that so much of the attention has turned to Yale itself with the Deborah Ramirez allegations,” said Akhil Amar, a professor of constitutional law at Yale Law School. Amar, who penned a New York Times op-ed in support of Kavanaugh’s nomination shortly after it was announced, has since called for an investigation of the sexual assault claims against the judge.

Allegations that another Yale Law School professor and Kavanaugh friend, Amy Chua, who ran Yale Law School’s clerkship program for several years and recommended several clerks to Kavanaugh from that post, told students the judge preferred attractive clerks and advised women to dress in an “outgoing” manner for their interviews with him have “poured gasoline on the fire,” said Amar. He defended Chua from accusations that he argues stemmed from the immaturity and oversensitivity of some law school students.

“You go to law school and this is the transition from carefree college days to the real world of work, and you’re blaming the law school for the unfairness of the real world.”

Chua, best known for her 2011 book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” has categorically denied the allegations against her. Law School Dean Heather Gerken in a memo told faculty members and students that the school is investigating “allegations of faculty misconduct” raised by recent news reports.

After The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer — graduates of Yale Law School and Yale College, respectively — published Ramirez’s account on Sunday, dozens of law students contacted their professors demanding that they cancel classes on Monday in order to allow them to protest Kavanaugh’s nomination. Several complied.

“This is what faculty support for, and solidarity with, student organizing looks like,” law student Dana Bolger wrote on Twitter, tagging James Forman Jr., a professor of criminal law and criminal procedure. She included in her tweet a screenshot of an email Forman sent to the class. “I just received a request to cancel class on Monday,” Forman wrote. “I understand that some students want to go to D.C. to protest or otherwise engage with the Kavanaugh hearings. Criminal Law will be canceled.” Forman did not respond to a request for comment.

Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science, declined to cancel his classes, telling students in an email shared with POLITICO that he makes “a sharp distinction” between his own progressive political activities and his “role as a university professor engaged in encouraging all my students, regardless of their politics, to engage in free-ranging academic discussion and research.”

“The idea that there should be an organized effort to close down classes is something that I very deeply oppose, and that was what they were trying to do, and some very substantial number of the faculty did indeed close down class,” Ackerman said in an interview, though he added that he has been impressed thus far by the tone and tenor of conversation on campus.

More than 100 students traveled to Washington in recent days, descending on the Senate and the Supreme Court to register their complaints. On campus, more than 260 Yale Law School students — nearly 40 percent of the student body — participated in a sit-in on Monday, according to the New Haven Register. They covered the walls of the school, as well and the building’s exterior, with signs have reading “#StopKavanaugh,” “#IStillBelieveAnitaHill,” and “YLS is a model of complicity.”

“Students are furious. For far too long, YLS has played a key role in funneling abusive, exploitative men into ever greater positions of power,” Bolger wrote in an email.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a 1973 graduate of the law school and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rallied the protesters Monday evening, praising the “courage and strength” of Kavanaugh’s female accusers. “They have stepped forward knowing that they faced a nightmare of public shame, false accusations and even threats to their safety,” Blumenthal said. He called on Sen. Chuck Grassley to put the brakes on the nomination and called for an independent investigation into the allegations.

“There are students very upset about the very serious and credible allegations that have been made. And some are deeply unhappy about views, both legal and jurisprudential,” Blumenthal told POLITICO on Wednesday.

The campus outrage hasn’t been limited to students.

Before the second and third allegations against Kavanaugh emerged, 40 percent of the law school faculty, including two former deans, signed an open letter demanding a full investigation into the allegation leveled by Christine Blasey Ford.

“With so much at stake for the Supreme Court and the nation, we are concerned about a rush to judgment that threatens both the integrity of the process and the public’s confidence in the Court,” the letter said. “Some questions are so fundamental to judicial integrity that the Senate cannot rush past them without undermining the public’s confidence in the Court. This is particularly so for an appointment that will yield a deciding vote on women’s rights and myriad other questions of immense consequence in American lives.”

Even professors who initially praised Kavanaugh’s nomination have since backed off. In a Yale Daily News op-ed published Monday titled “Second Thoughts on Kavanaugh,” Amar wrote, “I believe that these accusations deserve the best and most professional investigation possible — even if that means a brief additional delay on the ultimate vote on Judge Kavanaugh, and even if that investigatory delay imperils his confirmation.”

In an interview, Amar told POLITICO he spent half of his Constitutional Law class this week taking questions from students about his position on the Kavanaugh nomination. The many connections to the university has only intensified interest on the grounds.

“The story has taken a very decidedly Yale-ish turn,” he said.