"I see the arguments on both sides in regard to law student anonymity, but I believe that I come down on the 'no' side as far as whether law students should be able to protest anonymously. I haven't considered anonymity in regard to internal complaints or lawsuits as much, so I'll focus on anonymous protest.
First, as Professor Rapoport notes, in a few years we will be required to sign our names to all work product. I believe that it is good practice for law students to begin 'putting their money where their mouth is,' which we will be required to do in practice. If we can't expect students to advocate for causes they believe in without the mask of anonymity, how can we expect them to advocate for (potentially controversial) clients in full view of the public?
Second, I think removing the mask of anonymity provides valuable incentives. As demonstrated by last year's ADF Yale event, protests can be extremely disruptive. That is not to say we should not allow protest-I'm a firm believer in the right to (peacefully) protest. More what I'm getting at is that if students believe strongly enough in the cause they are protesting on behalf of, they should be willing to risk being associated with that cause, by name or otherwise. The unavailability of anonymity may prove valuable in that it can cause students to pause and consider whether they believe strongly enough in the cause to be associated with it. If they do not wish to be associated with the cause they are advocating for, they can still show up to the event to ask respectful questions of the speakers, but potential disruption would be avoided."
It seems to me that none of these questions should be specific to law students.
Should people be able to protest anonymously? Yes, provided that they protest in an anonymous way. Marching in a public place, or conspicuously walking out of a presentation, or physically blocking a door, or blaring at someone with a megaphone (to pick some examples seen recently, but not necessarily at Yale), are inherently public acts, and people who do such things should not expect to protect their identities. Public attention is the point of this type of protest, and no one should expect that their participation will be kept "private".
On the other hand, posting anonymous flyers or posters, or confiding one's feelings to friends, should reasonably be expected to be at least somewhat private.
Should people be able to file complaints anonymously? I recognize a concern: threat of retaliation can be a great inhibition to raising legitimate complaints or concerns. On the other hand, treating anonymous complaints seriously opens the door to litigious mistreatment of people who have committed no offense at all. It can put a respondent in the position of having to answer a claim amounting to "You have been accused of doing unspecified bad things at unspecified times. How do you plead? What evidence can you offer in your defense?" I guess I'd split the baby on this one - anonymous complaints may be taken, but will only be investigated to the extent that specific information is available, and must be quickly reduced to specific claims or dismissed.
Should people be able to file law suits anonymously? I think the current rule is good - a strong presumption against anonymity for any party.
Holding signs (that don’t obstruct others’ view) or walking out can’t reasonably be interpreted as “substantial disruption” -- even by Yale administrators -- so these worries seem disingenuous. To the extent protest is chilled, it’s indeed because students don’t want to risk going viral/making national news. Well, ok, then they’ve decided that their cause just isn’t important/righteous enough to bear the consequences. It always takes backbone to stand up for what you believe in.
What a wonderful, nuanced post, David, and you've raised important things for me to consider. I hadn't thought about the risk of how surreptitiously taping and then posting snippets of a real conversation could create an out-of-context and false impression of what someone did or didn't actually say (I SHOULD have, because it happens all the time), or how naming someone who's not ready to come out forces a person to balance two important rights (the right to express oneself in peaceful protest and the right to choose if and when to come out to friends/family/the world). I'll need to think about that issue more deeply, and I will. With respect to what I'd posted about the anonymous students speaking to the university's student newspaper about the law professor's alleged behavior, though, part of the problem is that the newspaper reporting the anonymous allegations didn't seem to be willing to investigate the allegations more broadly. The paper seemed to take the students at face value, without asking whether there were different voices to be heard/interviewed. I STILL have a problem with the anonymity of the students in that particular situation, who, having heard from the dean that the university had investigated the allegations and found them to have been untrue, have not come forward with a retraction--not even a retraction by "the anonymous students" as a group. Nor has the newspaper itself retracted its allegations. The unwillingness of those specific students to retract their statements has caused the professor great harm, has created a difficult environment for the entire school, and has continued to create an atmosphere in which even the non-specific allegations are taking on an anonymous life of their own. If students have concerns that should be brought to the administration, the administration should be able to drill down on those concerns, and the only way for the administration to do that is to talk with the affected students face-to-face. Face-to-face conversations aren't anonymous, so law students who want to be heard by the administration should be willing to name themselves. That leads me to consider your third question about whether law students should be allowed to file lawsuits under a "Doe" name, rather than under their own names. I need to think about that one, too. At what point should the responsibility of identifying oneself with one's statements (either one's own opinion or in the course of representing a client) supersede a need to protect oneself from retribution? I'll continue to mull your questions over, and I very much appreciate this post.
From Eugene Volokh's blog: "I was invited to participate in a Hofstra Law Review symposium on free speech in law schools, which will be happening in February." He has posted a copy of his draft article. An excerpt:
The lawyer's job is to persuade people, including people who may disagree with the lawyer. To do this, lawyers must be able to connect with people whose views may be very different from their own. ***
One critical function of law schools is to help students learn the skills that they can use to persuade people with whom they disagree. As importantly, law schools must help students learn the habits and attitudes required for that—and to unlearn the habits and attitudes, which are so much a part of human nature, that tend to undermine such connections.
It is of course human nature to categorize the world into us and them, the good and the bad, the "enlightened" and the "deplorable." It is human nature to let these categorizations leak into our assumptions about people, into our decisions about whether to listen to people, and into our manners when we speak with people. It is human nature to resist being exposed to arguments that challenge our deepest beliefs, or to facts that we may disapprove of or find offensive. That human nature, though, interferes with our effectiveness as lawyers.
My claim in this Essay will be that creating a culture of free speech and openness to contrary ideas at law schools—including on the most controversial of topics—is vital not just for democratic self-government, the search for truth, self-expression, and the like, but also for effectively training future lawyers. Law schools should do all they can to communicate this point to students, in thought and action.
1. No. 2. No. 3. No. Anonymity does not build character. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a drive by shooting. We’re talking about a legal system predicated on adversarial jousting. Anonymity is an embarrassment. Let’s stop with the virtue signaling.
It is difficult, though not impossible, for a university to investigate a complaint that is made anonymously, because a decent investigator needs to speak with the complainant in detail in order to make their determination. However, good investigative practices include requests for all participants to keep the proceedings confidential; on the student side, this can be enforced through the student code of conduct and for faculty can be enforced through the faculty code of conduct or equivalent.
To the first, I'd have to say it depends. The leadership of protests probably has to own their actions. Individual people in a protest, it doesn't seem so essential. Whether that means names *should* or *must* be published, is a separate matter. If it meaningfully adds to the story, fine. If it's not really necessary, I'd likely leave it out.
At least, for normal, minimally-disruptive protest sorts of things. Standing in the back (or outside the room) with signs, or with backs turned, that's nondisruptive. Asking one or two pointedly heckling questions during a Q&A, with maybe some brief heated back-and-forth or even a little speaking over each other before a move to someone else's question, that's *minimally* nondisruptive. A speaker (or questioner) who can't take the heat needs to get out of the kitchen. But if it's, say, one of those sorts of protests where one person stands up and shouts stuff til escorted out...then another does the same before the event can meaningfully resume...and the cycle repeats so many times the event is completely derailed by that coordinated action? At that point, especially in cases where disciplinary actions follow (which admittedly can't be known contemporaneously), I don't think custom should be to skip past naming you.
To the second, once someone's invoking the systems of "justice" (even if not of a legal, fully formalized sort -- there are still big consequences in play here!) against another, I think probably you do need to have sunlight on that. Anonymity shouldn't be assumed here. Anonymous complaints to so-called "bias response teams" can be used to harass. And the accused need to understand just what they're being accused of, and by whom, if they're to attempt a defense, or (if such seems possible) to attempt to work things out short of a full disciplinary system.
The third is just an intensified version of the second. No presumption of anonymity.
I suppose there might be cases in all these where writeups might voluntarily, above and beyond the ordinary call, not name someone, on a case by case basis. (Like, someone who files an obviously deficient complaint, and it's plain the complaint derives from a literal mental illness? But even that I could argue against, as such behavior really would be an important signal to the broader world about the person, til they received effective treatment. I'm not wild about an underdefined escape clause, but I don't think I understand the space well enough to propose more specific considerations.) But these seem like the default rules, and we should be looking for particular case-specific considerations if we want to extend greater anonymity than these baselines present.
All that said, I agree with the others who say if you're speaking up publicly, or publicly within your law school community, that does entail some "risk" of people going fully public on you. So *must* no one name people, in any of these cases? No. *Should* they not name, sometimes? Yes. I'm way more interested in voluntary norms of civility, decency, comity, etc. than in saying, black-letter, everything is and should always be public and there is no room for more generous norms of treatment of others.
1- Revoking the anonymity of protestors is a weapon to quell free speech. These protestors pose no risk to safety on campus, only potential embarrassment to school leadership.
2- Students do not enjoy due process protections at a school that they might in the legal system; arguments for rules that force them to endure the wrath of ham-handed educational institutions who frequently engage in extrajudicial retaliation ignore this wildly lopsided power imbalance.
3- Acts of protest are not to "build the character" of students; they are to bring accountability to administrators where there is none. It should not cost students their educational or professional careers when they point out injustice, particularly when universities have demonstrated astonishing indifference to the reputations of students when handling these matters.
4- These institutions do not hold their administrators to the same standard of transparency by which they wish their students to live. When these schools share the identity and culpability of administrators who have made decisions that fall into question, waive their right to legal remedy in favor of university rules, etc., they may then stand on moral ground higher than the Death Valley perch that they reside on today.
David, you ask, "Should law students be able to protest anonymously—or at least without having their names showing up in news articles?" But, you don't express who is potentially dis-enabling the anonymity. Suppose a student manages to protest without revealing their identity, e.g. by wearing a mask. If law students are "not able" to protest anonymously, would that masked protest be considered a violation? Are they then required to reveal their identity? Or, would such a rule impose obligations on anyone (from the university) publishing about the protest to identify any protesters mentioned or depicted?
Thanks for opening up a discussion on this important topic, not just for law schools, but for our society in general.
As a lawyer, as a former reporter, and as a citizen, I think we all should be very cautious about anonymous complaints given the massive potential for abuse. Anonymous complaints are generally inadmissible in court for good reasons - it's often unclear if they are based on personal knowledge or hearsay, they cannot be tested through cross-examination, and the use of anonymous complaints in a criminal case would generally violate the Constitution. Reporters should also be wary of publishing anonymous complaints, which could open them up to defamation suits. Personally, I would not want to be accused of misconduct or a crime by anonymous people, and so I don't think other people should be accused of misconduct or a crime by anonymous people as well.
Given this, I think that anonymous complaints can be useful as leads that could be used to open an investigation, but should not be used as the basis for any official action such as a lawsuit or employment action. This is not a perfect solution, but it's one that can be applied consistently and in keeping with due process.
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to protest someone may take your picture and someone might publish it somewhere. The more aggressive you are the more likely the behavior will be deemed noteworthy. The world doesn’t stop just because you go to an exclusive university.
Anonymous complaints are just cowardly. Unless, someone is afraid of physical violence, a law school student should know the accused has the right to confront the accuser in order to defend themselves. This nonsense of some of your students are complaining has got to go.
I almost fell out of my chair laughing at the “what if my parents find out” are the people 12 years old.
"[P]resuming that all viewpointsare worthy of respect" is a fundamental element of the First Amendment. If you disagree with a viewpoint, noone is forcing you to accept it. The marketplace of ideas determines the validity or lack thereof of any idea-not whether you or I deem that such a view as one that should not be encouraged or respected -which as we have seen in the recent revelations contained in the Twitter files constituted a blatant example of censorship of dissenting views on many issues of public concern.
I think that part of an education is learning how to disagree with, and respect a different point of view .I think that when you engage in a silent protest or a walkout that you are engaging in virtue signalling and the intellectual form of cancel culture which leads to the events of last spring at Yale LS. and worse and demonstrating that you do not subscribe to the purposes of a higher education , and especially the law, where understanding what the adversary thinks is a vital part of one's education and profession. i think that in no uncertain terms that calling someone a racist, patriarchal , climate denier, etc does not work when you are trying to either engage in a discussion , debate or persuade someone of the merits of your viewpoint on any issue . On the other hand, anonymity may very well be required at certain points within the confines ofany educational institution, as to issues of academics and internal school matters but when anyone files a lawsuit, noone should be anonymous except for the cases of an infant or in cases revolving around divorce or sexually charged allegations.
The Federalist Society must be so pleased that Yale Law is now protecting free speech! What a victory!
To celebrate, their next speaker at Yale should be their favorite governor, Ron DeSantis! He can talk about all the great things he's doing for free speech down in the great state of Florida. I can't believe they don't mention what a passionate 1A advocate he is on their website! https://fedsoc.org/contributors/ron-desantis
Posting on behalf of a reader who emailed me:
"I see the arguments on both sides in regard to law student anonymity, but I believe that I come down on the 'no' side as far as whether law students should be able to protest anonymously. I haven't considered anonymity in regard to internal complaints or lawsuits as much, so I'll focus on anonymous protest.
First, as Professor Rapoport notes, in a few years we will be required to sign our names to all work product. I believe that it is good practice for law students to begin 'putting their money where their mouth is,' which we will be required to do in practice. If we can't expect students to advocate for causes they believe in without the mask of anonymity, how can we expect them to advocate for (potentially controversial) clients in full view of the public?
Second, I think removing the mask of anonymity provides valuable incentives. As demonstrated by last year's ADF Yale event, protests can be extremely disruptive. That is not to say we should not allow protest-I'm a firm believer in the right to (peacefully) protest. More what I'm getting at is that if students believe strongly enough in the cause they are protesting on behalf of, they should be willing to risk being associated with that cause, by name or otherwise. The unavailability of anonymity may prove valuable in that it can cause students to pause and consider whether they believe strongly enough in the cause to be associated with it. If they do not wish to be associated with the cause they are advocating for, they can still show up to the event to ask respectful questions of the speakers, but potential disruption would be avoided."
Posting on behalf of a reader who emailed me:
"I am a retired Engineer. I helped put us on the moon. Engineers deal in truth and honesty and their work is never anonymous.
Students preparing for a profession must learn to think before acting and have the courage of their convictions."
It seems to me that none of these questions should be specific to law students.
Should people be able to protest anonymously? Yes, provided that they protest in an anonymous way. Marching in a public place, or conspicuously walking out of a presentation, or physically blocking a door, or blaring at someone with a megaphone (to pick some examples seen recently, but not necessarily at Yale), are inherently public acts, and people who do such things should not expect to protect their identities. Public attention is the point of this type of protest, and no one should expect that their participation will be kept "private".
On the other hand, posting anonymous flyers or posters, or confiding one's feelings to friends, should reasonably be expected to be at least somewhat private.
Should people be able to file complaints anonymously? I recognize a concern: threat of retaliation can be a great inhibition to raising legitimate complaints or concerns. On the other hand, treating anonymous complaints seriously opens the door to litigious mistreatment of people who have committed no offense at all. It can put a respondent in the position of having to answer a claim amounting to "You have been accused of doing unspecified bad things at unspecified times. How do you plead? What evidence can you offer in your defense?" I guess I'd split the baby on this one - anonymous complaints may be taken, but will only be investigated to the extent that specific information is available, and must be quickly reduced to specific claims or dismissed.
Should people be able to file law suits anonymously? I think the current rule is good - a strong presumption against anonymity for any party.
Holding signs (that don’t obstruct others’ view) or walking out can’t reasonably be interpreted as “substantial disruption” -- even by Yale administrators -- so these worries seem disingenuous. To the extent protest is chilled, it’s indeed because students don’t want to risk going viral/making national news. Well, ok, then they’ve decided that their cause just isn’t important/righteous enough to bear the consequences. It always takes backbone to stand up for what you believe in.
What a wonderful, nuanced post, David, and you've raised important things for me to consider. I hadn't thought about the risk of how surreptitiously taping and then posting snippets of a real conversation could create an out-of-context and false impression of what someone did or didn't actually say (I SHOULD have, because it happens all the time), or how naming someone who's not ready to come out forces a person to balance two important rights (the right to express oneself in peaceful protest and the right to choose if and when to come out to friends/family/the world). I'll need to think about that issue more deeply, and I will. With respect to what I'd posted about the anonymous students speaking to the university's student newspaper about the law professor's alleged behavior, though, part of the problem is that the newspaper reporting the anonymous allegations didn't seem to be willing to investigate the allegations more broadly. The paper seemed to take the students at face value, without asking whether there were different voices to be heard/interviewed. I STILL have a problem with the anonymity of the students in that particular situation, who, having heard from the dean that the university had investigated the allegations and found them to have been untrue, have not come forward with a retraction--not even a retraction by "the anonymous students" as a group. Nor has the newspaper itself retracted its allegations. The unwillingness of those specific students to retract their statements has caused the professor great harm, has created a difficult environment for the entire school, and has continued to create an atmosphere in which even the non-specific allegations are taking on an anonymous life of their own. If students have concerns that should be brought to the administration, the administration should be able to drill down on those concerns, and the only way for the administration to do that is to talk with the affected students face-to-face. Face-to-face conversations aren't anonymous, so law students who want to be heard by the administration should be willing to name themselves. That leads me to consider your third question about whether law students should be allowed to file lawsuits under a "Doe" name, rather than under their own names. I need to think about that one, too. At what point should the responsibility of identifying oneself with one's statements (either one's own opinion or in the course of representing a client) supersede a need to protect oneself from retribution? I'll continue to mull your questions over, and I very much appreciate this post.
From Eugene Volokh's blog: "I was invited to participate in a Hofstra Law Review symposium on free speech in law schools, which will be happening in February." He has posted a copy of his draft article. An excerpt:
The lawyer's job is to persuade people, including people who may disagree with the lawyer. To do this, lawyers must be able to connect with people whose views may be very different from their own. ***
One critical function of law schools is to help students learn the skills that they can use to persuade people with whom they disagree. As importantly, law schools must help students learn the habits and attitudes required for that—and to unlearn the habits and attitudes, which are so much a part of human nature, that tend to undermine such connections.
It is of course human nature to categorize the world into us and them, the good and the bad, the "enlightened" and the "deplorable." It is human nature to let these categorizations leak into our assumptions about people, into our decisions about whether to listen to people, and into our manners when we speak with people. It is human nature to resist being exposed to arguments that challenge our deepest beliefs, or to facts that we may disapprove of or find offensive. That human nature, though, interferes with our effectiveness as lawyers.
My claim in this Essay will be that creating a culture of free speech and openness to contrary ideas at law schools—including on the most controversial of topics—is vital not just for democratic self-government, the search for truth, self-expression, and the like, but also for effectively training future lawyers. Law schools should do all they can to communicate this point to students, in thought and action.
1. No. 2. No. 3. No. Anonymity does not build character. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a drive by shooting. We’re talking about a legal system predicated on adversarial jousting. Anonymity is an embarrassment. Let’s stop with the virtue signaling.
It is difficult, though not impossible, for a university to investigate a complaint that is made anonymously, because a decent investigator needs to speak with the complainant in detail in order to make their determination. However, good investigative practices include requests for all participants to keep the proceedings confidential; on the student side, this can be enforced through the student code of conduct and for faculty can be enforced through the faculty code of conduct or equivalent.
To the first, I'd have to say it depends. The leadership of protests probably has to own their actions. Individual people in a protest, it doesn't seem so essential. Whether that means names *should* or *must* be published, is a separate matter. If it meaningfully adds to the story, fine. If it's not really necessary, I'd likely leave it out.
At least, for normal, minimally-disruptive protest sorts of things. Standing in the back (or outside the room) with signs, or with backs turned, that's nondisruptive. Asking one or two pointedly heckling questions during a Q&A, with maybe some brief heated back-and-forth or even a little speaking over each other before a move to someone else's question, that's *minimally* nondisruptive. A speaker (or questioner) who can't take the heat needs to get out of the kitchen. But if it's, say, one of those sorts of protests where one person stands up and shouts stuff til escorted out...then another does the same before the event can meaningfully resume...and the cycle repeats so many times the event is completely derailed by that coordinated action? At that point, especially in cases where disciplinary actions follow (which admittedly can't be known contemporaneously), I don't think custom should be to skip past naming you.
To the second, once someone's invoking the systems of "justice" (even if not of a legal, fully formalized sort -- there are still big consequences in play here!) against another, I think probably you do need to have sunlight on that. Anonymity shouldn't be assumed here. Anonymous complaints to so-called "bias response teams" can be used to harass. And the accused need to understand just what they're being accused of, and by whom, if they're to attempt a defense, or (if such seems possible) to attempt to work things out short of a full disciplinary system.
The third is just an intensified version of the second. No presumption of anonymity.
I suppose there might be cases in all these where writeups might voluntarily, above and beyond the ordinary call, not name someone, on a case by case basis. (Like, someone who files an obviously deficient complaint, and it's plain the complaint derives from a literal mental illness? But even that I could argue against, as such behavior really would be an important signal to the broader world about the person, til they received effective treatment. I'm not wild about an underdefined escape clause, but I don't think I understand the space well enough to propose more specific considerations.) But these seem like the default rules, and we should be looking for particular case-specific considerations if we want to extend greater anonymity than these baselines present.
All that said, I agree with the others who say if you're speaking up publicly, or publicly within your law school community, that does entail some "risk" of people going fully public on you. So *must* no one name people, in any of these cases? No. *Should* they not name, sometimes? Yes. I'm way more interested in voluntary norms of civility, decency, comity, etc. than in saying, black-letter, everything is and should always be public and there is no room for more generous norms of treatment of others.
1- Revoking the anonymity of protestors is a weapon to quell free speech. These protestors pose no risk to safety on campus, only potential embarrassment to school leadership.
2- Students do not enjoy due process protections at a school that they might in the legal system; arguments for rules that force them to endure the wrath of ham-handed educational institutions who frequently engage in extrajudicial retaliation ignore this wildly lopsided power imbalance.
3- Acts of protest are not to "build the character" of students; they are to bring accountability to administrators where there is none. It should not cost students their educational or professional careers when they point out injustice, particularly when universities have demonstrated astonishing indifference to the reputations of students when handling these matters.
4- These institutions do not hold their administrators to the same standard of transparency by which they wish their students to live. When these schools share the identity and culpability of administrators who have made decisions that fall into question, waive their right to legal remedy in favor of university rules, etc., they may then stand on moral ground higher than the Death Valley perch that they reside on today.
David, you ask, "Should law students be able to protest anonymously—or at least without having their names showing up in news articles?" But, you don't express who is potentially dis-enabling the anonymity. Suppose a student manages to protest without revealing their identity, e.g. by wearing a mask. If law students are "not able" to protest anonymously, would that masked protest be considered a violation? Are they then required to reveal their identity? Or, would such a rule impose obligations on anyone (from the university) publishing about the protest to identify any protesters mentioned or depicted?
Thanks for opening up a discussion on this important topic, not just for law schools, but for our society in general.
As a lawyer, as a former reporter, and as a citizen, I think we all should be very cautious about anonymous complaints given the massive potential for abuse. Anonymous complaints are generally inadmissible in court for good reasons - it's often unclear if they are based on personal knowledge or hearsay, they cannot be tested through cross-examination, and the use of anonymous complaints in a criminal case would generally violate the Constitution. Reporters should also be wary of publishing anonymous complaints, which could open them up to defamation suits. Personally, I would not want to be accused of misconduct or a crime by anonymous people, and so I don't think other people should be accused of misconduct or a crime by anonymous people as well.
Given this, I think that anonymous complaints can be useful as leads that could be used to open an investigation, but should not be used as the basis for any official action such as a lawsuit or employment action. This is not a perfect solution, but it's one that can be applied consistently and in keeping with due process.
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to protest someone may take your picture and someone might publish it somewhere. The more aggressive you are the more likely the behavior will be deemed noteworthy. The world doesn’t stop just because you go to an exclusive university.
Anonymous complaints are just cowardly. Unless, someone is afraid of physical violence, a law school student should know the accused has the right to confront the accuser in order to defend themselves. This nonsense of some of your students are complaining has got to go.
I almost fell out of my chair laughing at the “what if my parents find out” are the people 12 years old.
"[P]resuming that all viewpointsare worthy of respect" is a fundamental element of the First Amendment. If you disagree with a viewpoint, noone is forcing you to accept it. The marketplace of ideas determines the validity or lack thereof of any idea-not whether you or I deem that such a view as one that should not be encouraged or respected -which as we have seen in the recent revelations contained in the Twitter files constituted a blatant example of censorship of dissenting views on many issues of public concern.
I think that part of an education is learning how to disagree with, and respect a different point of view .I think that when you engage in a silent protest or a walkout that you are engaging in virtue signalling and the intellectual form of cancel culture which leads to the events of last spring at Yale LS. and worse and demonstrating that you do not subscribe to the purposes of a higher education , and especially the law, where understanding what the adversary thinks is a vital part of one's education and profession. i think that in no uncertain terms that calling someone a racist, patriarchal , climate denier, etc does not work when you are trying to either engage in a discussion , debate or persuade someone of the merits of your viewpoint on any issue . On the other hand, anonymity may very well be required at certain points within the confines ofany educational institution, as to issues of academics and internal school matters but when anyone files a lawsuit, noone should be anonymous except for the cases of an infant or in cases revolving around divorce or sexually charged allegations.
The Federalist Society must be so pleased that Yale Law is now protecting free speech! What a victory!
To celebrate, their next speaker at Yale should be their favorite governor, Ron DeSantis! He can talk about all the great things he's doing for free speech down in the great state of Florida. I can't believe they don't mention what a passionate 1A advocate he is on their website! https://fedsoc.org/contributors/ron-desantis