Notably lacking among Yale’s professors has been any vigorous defense of Judge Alito or of the conservative judicial philosophy he’s believed to hold. No one has stepped forward to defend or even suggest that the country would be better off with another Roe vs. Wade skeptic on the court who is also an “originalist” (believes the Constitution should be interpreted as it was originally written) and a federalist (believing in strict separation of federal and state powers). Such ideas supposedly belong to conservative extremists, who are considered beyond the pale at Yale Law School….
We don’t say this to whine about being underrepresented as conservatives at Yale Law School. But the school’s lack of diversity increasingly represents a scholarly and pedagogical problem for Yale. For example, the Rehnquist court was a revolution in the country’s jurisprudence. Except as fuel for denunciations of the court’s conservative majority, these developments have gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship of Yale Law’s professors….
Yale Law School is clustered in one corner of the debate about public law. Having even a small number of conservative scholars on campus could fix this – and save us Federalist Society members the indignity of having to import the conservative side of every debate we host.
Compare and contrast: Harvard. When I was in law school, Yale was considered a friendly place for Federalist Society types compared to Harvard.
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