Kerby Anderson

Judge James Ho serves in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He made news the other day when he announced that he would no longer be hiring law clerks from Yale Law School.

To understand why he announced this, we need to go back to a commentary I wrote six months ago. A law professor at Yale put together a panel that included Monica Miller (a secular progressive associated with the American Humanist Association) and Kristen Waggoner (a conservative with Alliance Defending Freedom). The goal was to show that people with different political and religious views can find common ground. Unfortunately, the students didn’t get the memo. Disruptions from the law students were so intense, the police had to call for backups and were forced to escort the panelists from the building.

In the last month, I have had two guests talk about the incident. One was Kristen Waggoner who is now serving as the president of ADF. The other was Nadine Strossen, who is an emeritus law professor and previous president of the ACLU. These two women may disagree about many social and political issues, but they both agree that the actions of the Yale Law students were outrageous and unacceptable.

Judge Ho explained in his speech, that “Yale not only tolerates the cancellation of views . . . it actively practices it.” He went on to lament the impact cancel culture is having on a wide variety of institutions. Within his speech, he provided a long list of those institutions: educational institutions, the legal profession, corporate America, journalism, entertainment, sports, and the arts.

He noted that “when elite law schools like Yale teach their students that there are no consequences to their intolerance, it sticks with them.” I encourage other judges to follow his lead and teach these students there are consequences.