Federal Judges Say They Won’t Hire Clerks From Stanford Law School After Latest Struggle Session

James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, who announced a clerkship boycott of Yale Law last year, are adding Stanford to the list

James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, both circuit court judges, have announced that they will not take on clerks from Stanford Law School going forward. This step follows after last year’s announcement that the judges would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School. “We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,” Ho, who sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, stated on Saturday evening in a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics, which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. However, the clerkship moratorium on both schools will not impact the current law students.

Ho’s latest announcement comes as part of his effort to hold Stanford accountable for the recent incident involving Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan. At a talk held in Stanford Law School last month, Duncan was shouted down by hundreds of students and Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach berated him. The unruly students hurled insults including calling Duncan “scum” and asking him offensive questions. Stanford has stood by its decision not to discipline the hecklers despite violating the school’s free speech policy by doing so.

Ho strongly condemned the disturbance as an act of “intellectual terrorism” and sees Duncan’s treatment as a reflection of the rampant discrimination in viewpoints at elite law schools. Furthermore, it isn’t mere coincidence that the worst free speech incidents happen in the schools that have the least intellectual diversity. While there is no explicit mention of conditions that could lift the boycott, Ho implied that a faculty with wider political diversity and an administration that is less ideologically uniform would go a long way in that regard.

Ho and Branch introduced the idea of a boycott on Yale Law School and are among 14 federal judges boycotting the school over its handling of certain free speech incidents. Ho also remarked that if judges who were against discrimination at both Yale and Stanford took a similar stance by refusing to hire clerks from the schools, it could prompt changes in their policies regarding discrimination.

Read Judge James Ho’s complete comments about the boycott from Stanford Law School here.