How liberal are law schools? DEI trumps teaching the Constitution

Donald Trump’s conviction in May on frivolous criminal charges in New York shows that the legal establishment not only has fallen prey to our extreme politics but also has become a willing coconspirator in it. Law school deans and faculty members should have stepped forward to act as a brake on a radicalized profession.
Sadly, many of our leading law schools have lost their bearings. Law school leaders and faculties have steadily disavowed teaching the constitutional text and structure to instead promote the latest fads in diversity, equity and inclusion. Faculty hostility toward true academic freedom, a content-neutral approach to free speech and study of the Constitution’s text has gone so far that law schools are now rejecting donors who wish to support research in separation of powers, federalism and constitutional interpretation.  
Not surprisingly, their students have become increasingly ignorant of, and disrespectful to, constitutional values – exacerbating the disorder on campus.
A 2023 survey of accredited law schools reveals that only 68% require law students to take a course in constitutional law for a mean of 3.6 credit hours, which amounts to one semester of study. By comparison, 100% of law schools require students to take a course on contracts, with a mean number of 4.7 credit hours. Torts and civil procedure are similarly required by 99.5% of law schools with mean credit hours of 4.2 and 4.5 credit hours.
No laughing matter:Humorless scolds on the left want to silence your ‘offensive’ views
Little wonder, then, that law students − like undergraduates − are displaying open contempt for freedom of speech. In 2022, more than 100 Yale law students screamed, banged walls and hurled insults so that police had to appear. Why? Because a conservative lawyer wanted to discuss a Supreme Court First Amendment case she had argued. Indeed, Yale’s cancel culture has become so notorious that several prominent federal judges have pledged not to hire its graduates.
But it’s not just Yale. Georgetown’s law school suspended the director of its Center for the Constitution, Ilya Shapiro, because he criticized President Joe Biden’s pledge to appoint only a Black woman Supreme Court justice. Shapiro later resigned.
Last year, dozens of Stanford Law School students disrupted a speech by federal appellate Judge Kyle Duncan.  
Anti-Israeli protesters snuck into the home of my law school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Berkeley, to disrupt a dinner for graduating students in April. They assured Chemerinsky, one of the nation’s leading liberal scholars, that they could treat his private home as a public forum for their protest (you don’t need a law degree to know they were utterly wrong).  
Neither Berkeley nor Stanford expelled any of the students involved in these protests. Friends at other schools report unrelenting antisemitic harassment of Jewish students and faculty that deans have done little to stop.
This anti-constitutional sentiment afflicts how law schools deal with financial gifts; law school faculties are vigorously opposing contributions from conservative donors to promote the study of the Constitution.  
In 2021, for example, prominent conservative lawyer and philanthropist Leonard Leo tried to give $25 million to his alma mater, Cornell Law School, to create a Center for the Study of the Structural Constitution. The gift had no strings regarding what scholarship was to be produced by this center. Nevertheless, the law faculty opposed the gift because they worried that the center “would establish a beachhead for far-right scholarship,” according to The Intercept.
Cornell’s reaction confirms that law faculties harbor deep antipathy to conservative participation in law school curriculum or discourse.
Higher education needs diversity:Young conservatives are told not to attend college. That’s shortsighted.
Leo’s attempts to steer the legal academy toward more study and teaching of the Constitution are much needed. A study of diversity in law schools published in 2016 found that only 11% of law professors are Republican.
Law schools annually spend tens of millions of dollars, collected from progressive individuals and entities, and even taxpayer dollars, to pursue progressive scholarship, course development and litigation. Centers focused on racial, social or gender justice are ubiquitous in law schools, as are legal clinics designed to advance progressive agendas through litigation.
The leftward ideological slant of law schools, if left unbalanced, will continue to degrade American law and erode fundamental rights.
We can’t keep our republic if those entrusted with teaching and learning the law − particularly constitutional law − evince hostility to open debate and opposing views.
While recent events suggest some awareness of the need for serious reform, much more is needed, and soon.
For the good of the country, law schools must make a concerted effort to restore ideological diversity in their faculty, programs and scholarship.
John Yoo is a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership, University of Texas at Austin; a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.