A Law Prof Rationalizes a Campus Attack on Free Speech

The heckler’s veto won the day at UC Hastings

Letter to WSJ. 

"While it’s understandable that Rory Little wants to defend his students at UC Hastings (“Open Minds, Loud Voices and Cancel Culture,” Letters, March 28), he ends up twisted in logical knots. If an event that can’t be conducted because of incessant disruption doesn’t count as a cancellation, nothing does. It may well be that, “after the intermittent chanting and speaking, everyone quietly and peacefully left the room,” but that was only after I had departed—because the room’s lunch-hour reservation expired ahead of an afternoon class.

That’s the crux of the matter: This was not some speaker’s corner where opposing activists face off, but a space duly reserved by a student organization for an invited speaker (and faculty commentator) to discuss issues that are plainly germane to a law school’s mission. Constitutional law may well be “murky, inconsistent and unsettled” in many areas, but neither the First Amendment nor UC Hastings’s policies countenance a heckler’s veto. And if shouting down were protected speech, opponents of critical race theory and other progressive causes could likewise cancel events.

Moreover, Prof. Little contributed to my being silenced. He rapped the table and chanted along. He is recorded on video saying he was “all for it,” and then signed a letter reiterating support for the disrupters because “statements of commitment to diversity and inclusion ring hollow when salient issues of racial equity are ignored or discounted in the service of prioritizing the ideal of free speech.”

While I’m heartened that “the college is now engaged in constructive, if also unsettling, discussions,” that has nothing to do with me. I would have happily engaged the “message of discontent from a group of neglected and undervalued members of the community”—my tweet was racist only to someone misreading it in bad faith—but the disrupters didn’t want to hear it and, given Mr. Little’s description of the Hastings dynamic, they are being rewarded for their actions.

Ilya Shapiro

Birmingham, Ala.

Georgetown Law Center (on leave)"