Bonus Weekend Content on Dorf on Law Tomorrow

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Note to readers:

My second column of this week was supposed to run today, Friday the 8th.  However, Professor David Marcus's guest column, "Meaningful Campus Engagement with Government Officials: A Response to UCLA’s Critics," which is an excellent and enlightening discussion of a recent event at UCLA Law, was the fifth column of the week, and I want to leave it as the most recent new essay on the blog for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, in a very rare instance of new content appearing on Dorf on Law over a weekend, I will offer my planned column (addressing an entirely different subject).

I do feel the need to offer one small note regarding Professor Marcus's essay, in which he referred to another incident regarding student protesters at a different elite law school.  He wrote: "Nothing like what has happened on other campuses, where speakers could not continue, happened at UCLA."  The hot link in that sentence takes readers to a different professor's post about a controversy at Stanford in early 2023, where an event featuring a Fifth Circuit judge made national news.

For what it might be worth, I wrote five pieces about that incident, in the second of which I make the case that the Stanford situation has been wrongly portrayed as an example of lefty students bullying a poor, beleaguered right-wing speaker into silence.  That is not what happened.  (To be very clear, that is not how Professor Marcus described it, as the quote above demonstrates.)

I cannot know, of course, why Professor Marcus seemed to stipulate that the Stanford event was on the other side of a line that he (correctly) says was not crossed last month at UCLA.  I can say that he might be understood as saying that even if one views the Stanford event as unacceptable, the UCLA event most definitely was not.  At least, that is how I would read it.

In any event, I want to emphasize that nothing I have said here in any way detracts from the quality of Professor Marcus's piece.  It is an important contribution to everyone's understanding of what in fact happened at UCLA.

- Neil H. Buchanan