8 ms·

Stanford law student who made fun of the federalist able to graduate after all

48 points by Flatcircle 5y ago

1helloworld1 5y ago
The Federalist Society ideals involve "checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning". If they truly cared about protecting individual liberty, they wouldn't have complained about one person's satire. They making a big fuss about it is quite antithetical to their organization's ideals.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  Perhaps, but I'm looking at this with a Machiavellian/Realpolitik lens. If you go after people who criticize you, even if those people are perfectly allowed to do so, you create a chilling effect and you signal that your organization has power and needs to be treated with care. Sure, it's perfectly legal to exercise your free speech rights, but dragging someone through the mud dissuades many people from making criticisms.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    This seems like a good method if you actually had the power to fully follow through and incredibly naive If it fails: it’s like if a king were to go against the church without even having the people or nobles on their side.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I feel like an organization of lawyers can easily pony-up the resources for lawsuits designed to intimidate critics.
- virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
  "Freedom! Freedom!! ... whoa, whoa, hold on, OUR freedom, not theirs!"
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  What if I made a flyer that promoted a "Black lives matter mostly peaceful arson and riot" ? Somehow I don't think Stanford would be saying "chill out it's just satire."
  - krapp 5y ago
    For one thing, the flyer in the OP is satirically promoting a debate, not an actual insurrection.
  - GPerson 5y ago
    I’m interested in a neutral explanation of why this post is widely downvoted. What is the significant difference between a satirical flyer titled “Black Lives Matter — Mostly Peaceful Arson and Riot” and a satirical flyer titled “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection”? I’ll grant the second is more original, and perhaps wittier in the context of a mostly progressive law school audience. But both of these are intended to mock one side and entertain the other. Both of these are crass, and both implicitly defame. However only one of these would be met with a school-wide email from the university president apologizing for the offense and reaffirming commitments to support and promote diversity. I think this is what the original poster is asserting.
    - mcphage 5y ago
      If you posted a flyer calling for arson and riot, even satirically, it probably wouldn't have gone over well. This was a flyer advertising a talk. > But both of these are intended to mock one side and entertain the other. Both of these are crass, and both implicitly defame. So what? That's not illegal. You're allowed to criticize others—that's a key purpose of the First Amendment.
      - GPerson 5y ago
        Hello, Respectfully, I believe you’ve missed the point of my post, which is not to assert the validity or invalidity of either perspective (I agree both should be protected by the first amendment), but to question why the audience of this website downvoted the original post so readily, and to boost the opinion that there is a political bias in university administrations. Additionally, the flyer about Black Lives Matter could equally well be a talk.
- throwaway5752 5y ago
  They are a Republican political organization and have been for decades. They provide a bench of bodies for appointments to forward Republican political policies on the judicial side. Their ideals are a worthless slogan, they operate on realpolitik. They get wealth and power for delivering tax cuts for people like the Scaifes and Mercers. This entire episode is completely on-brand.
  - an_opabinia 5y ago
    You could call the Federalist Society's activities affirmative action for Republicans.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- spoonjim 5y ago
  You are quite wrong, the Federalist Society ideals involve pushing Republican tax cuts through the cap-and-gown sector of American society.
underseacables 5y ago
I think this is one of those extreme cases. The student should be admonished, his actions were presented as absolutely legitimate, and that could have caused harm. What if someone saw the flyer and decided to react violently not realizing it was just satire? While I’m all for speech being protected, in this case the student’s actions were reckless. Keep him from graduating? No, not that serious, but certainly a stern admonishment that satire is fine but don’t try and pass it off as truth.
- awillen 5y ago
  This happened at Stanford Law School... these are highly educated people who can recognize satire. None of them were going to engage in violent insurrection because of this. He was also very obviously not trying to pass it off as truth.
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    Given that I've never heard of the Stanford Federalist Society, I would be unable to identify this as satire. It's presented as any other official flyer from that organisation might be. In a way, it's defamation - a false statement (in its accreditation) that harms the organisation's reputation. For some people, this will be their first experience of that organisation, and those people have no reason to take it as satire.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      Please join the Stanford Federalist Society as we welcome Senator Joshua Hawley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to discuss violent insurrection. Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government. Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government. Senator Hawley will argue that the ends justify the means. Attorney General Paxton will explain that when the Supreme Court refuses to exercise its Article III authority to overturn the results of a free and fair election, calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol represents an appropriate alternative remedy. This is dripping in satire. Pretty hard to miss.
wheaties 5y ago
This seems to be the growing trend of anything happening online or within media outlets. "We hold these rights as sacrosanct for all people ...unless they use those rights against causes or people for which we support, including us!"
djrogers 5y ago
Once again, FIRE doing great work in helping school administrators realize when they’ve crossed a line. I strongly urge everyone to support them.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Even better, support the ACLU. They will fight for people even if they are not privileged enough to be in higher education.
  - javagram 5y ago
    The ACLU is more of a partisan organization aligned with the democrats nowadays. Good or bad, it has been great for their fundraising. (Of course the same has happened to many other groups which have switched to being partisan aligned on one side or another) EFF and FIRE seem more similar to the “old” ACLU although both have very limited missions.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The ACLU is more of a partisan organization aligned with the democrats nowadays. In that as the set of political realignments that started with the New Deal, got new direction from the Civil Rights movement and the response to it, and completed around the mid-1990s wound up, the Republicans, who were not consistently so before the realignment, ended up firmly opposed to both core principles of the ACLU and, as a tribal identity marker, the ACLU itseld (heck, even in the 1980s, Republicans used a Democratic candidate being a “card carrying member of the ACLU” as an attack.) The ACLU didn't really go anywhere, the national partisan alignment shifted so that the positions it always held were partisan.
      - javagram 5y ago
        Disagree based on the reporting I’ve read. Actually just saw another reported piece from the NYT pop up on this, but I’ve seen others in the same vein previously which informed my comment. “Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis: An organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
HarryHirsch 5y ago
My chemistry teacher at school (that was in Europe) once lost it over someone who had vandalised an election poster. Elections were coming up, and someone had vandalized a poster from the Socialists. Dude himself was part of the right lunatic fringe himself, but (maybe because of that) the constitutional right of political expression was sacred to him. And here in the US you need to engage in discussion with your betters about your right to political speech. It's disheartening, it really is.
compiler-guy 5y ago
Worth noting that the organization that came to the satirist’s defense, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “FIRE” took a principled stand here. In other cases, it sides with the Federalist Society which comes under criticism from the left. For example, the Rutgers law school student bar association had required all organizations under it to have sessions on CRT, but FIRE threatened to sue and they relented. https://www.thefire.org/victory-facing-public-pressure-rutgers-law-student-bar-association-rescinds-critical-race-theory-requirement/ https://www.thefire.org/victory-facing-public-pressure-rutge...
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  Sounds like they have good principles.
  - mynegation 5y ago
    Whether one agrees with their principles or not, that was an absolute power move. If one is on the fence - would you rather associate with organization like this or a side that shuts down any opportunity for a discourse.
    - BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I would much rather stand with the principled institution. That being said, the opposing institution that uses it's resources to shut down opportunities for discourse will probably end up being more powerful and successful in propagating it's ideology in the long-run. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
    - stronglikedan 5y ago
      I'm personally always for discourse, whether I'm dealing with a principled institution or not. I'm the type that will usually side against the issuer of an ultimatum. Although, I loathe hypocrisy, so will usually side with a principled institution over the alternative. I guess it really depends on the situation. The devil is in the details or some such something or other. The best part of being a centrist is that everyone else naturally hates me, so it's easy to pick one side or the other in each individual situation, with no loyalties.
Mizza 5y ago
> The student alleged that Wallace’s satire “defamed” the Stanford Federalist Society, causing “harm” to the student group and to the “individual reputations” of the officers. This reminds of me of the case of 'Hustler Magazine v. Falwell', detailed in the film 'The People vs. Larry Flynt'. The court affirmed, unanimously, that with regard to public figures and organizations, people_do_ have the right to try to cause harm and damage to their reputations. And why shouldn't we? In the case of satire, that's exactly the point.
ffggvv 5y ago
meanwhile if a conservative posted a flyer the whole school and media and rainbow-hairs would be dancing in ecstasy cheering that the hateful bigot was removed
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Your personal sense of grievance probably doesn't have the predictive power you think it does.
phlakaton 5y ago
This is one in a grand history of parody flyers and papers on campus. The Chapparal used to love taking the mickey out of the Stanford Daily by printing up fake papers and dropping them in the Daily’s newspaper racks around campus on one of their off days. Stories were told of the Daily staffers running madly around campus trying to remove them. The student LGBT organization responded to an infamous two-page spread published by the Stanford Review about the evils of homosexuality with a none-too-polite two-page spread of their own. The only thing that might have been improved in this case: a disclaimer at the bottom. I’m amused a law student didn’t think to include that.
hackeraccount 5y ago
Being principled when the outcome agrees with your politics is no harder then being unprincipled when it disagrees with them.
findjashua 5y ago
Free speech for me, but not for thee

48 points by Flatcircle 5y ago

The Federalist Society ideals involve "checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning". If they truly cared about protecting individual liberty, they wouldn't have complained about one person's satire. They making a big fuss about it is quite antithetical to their organization's ideals.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
Perhaps, but I'm looking at this with a Machiavellian/Realpolitik lens. If you go after people who criticize you, even if those people are perfectly allowed to do so, you create a chilling effect and you signal that your organization has power and needs to be treated with care. Sure, it's perfectly legal to exercise your free speech rights, but dragging someone through the mud dissuades many people from making criticisms.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  This seems like a good method if you actually had the power to fully follow through and incredibly naive If it fails: it’s like if a king were to go against the church without even having the people or nobles on their side.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I feel like an organization of lawyers can easily pony-up the resources for lawsuits designed to intimidate critics.
virgil_disgr4ce 5y ago
"Freedom! Freedom!! ... whoa, whoa, hold on, OUR freedom, not theirs!"
gotoeleven 5y ago
What if I made a flyer that promoted a "Black lives matter mostly peaceful arson and riot" ? Somehow I don't think Stanford would be saying "chill out it's just satire."
- krapp 5y ago
  For one thing, the flyer in the OP is satirically promoting a debate, not an actual insurrection.
- GPerson 5y ago
  I’m interested in a neutral explanation of why this post is widely downvoted. What is the significant difference between a satirical flyer titled “Black Lives Matter — Mostly Peaceful Arson and Riot” and a satirical flyer titled “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection”? I’ll grant the second is more original, and perhaps wittier in the context of a mostly progressive law school audience. But both of these are intended to mock one side and entertain the other. Both of these are crass, and both implicitly defame. However only one of these would be met with a school-wide email from the university president apologizing for the offense and reaffirming commitments to support and promote diversity. I think this is what the original poster is asserting.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    If you posted a flyer calling for arson and riot, even satirically, it probably wouldn't have gone over well. This was a flyer advertising a talk. > But both of these are intended to mock one side and entertain the other. Both of these are crass, and both implicitly defame. So what? That's not illegal. You're allowed to criticize others—that's a key purpose of the First Amendment.
    - GPerson 5y ago
      Hello, Respectfully, I believe you’ve missed the point of my post, which is not to assert the validity or invalidity of either perspective (I agree both should be protected by the first amendment), but to question why the audience of this website downvoted the original post so readily, and to boost the opinion that there is a political bias in university administrations. Additionally, the flyer about Black Lives Matter could equally well be a talk.
throwaway5752 5y ago
They are a Republican political organization and have been for decades. They provide a bench of bodies for appointments to forward Republican political policies on the judicial side. Their ideals are a worthless slogan, they operate on realpolitik. They get wealth and power for delivering tax cuts for people like the Scaifes and Mercers. This entire episode is completely on-brand.
- an_opabinia 5y ago
  You could call the Federalist Society's activities affirmative action for Republicans.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
spoonjim 5y ago
You are quite wrong, the Federalist Society ideals involve pushing Republican tax cuts through the cap-and-gown sector of American society.

underseacables 5y ago

I think this is one of those extreme cases. The student should be admonished, his actions were presented as absolutely legitimate, and that could have caused harm. What if someone saw the flyer and decided to react violently not realizing it was just satire? While I’m all for speech being protected, in this case the student’s actions were reckless. Keep him from graduating? No, not that serious, but certainly a stern admonishment that satire is fine but don’t try and pass it off as truth.

awillen 5y ago
This happened at Stanford Law School... these are highly educated people who can recognize satire. None of them were going to engage in violent insurrection because of this. He was also very obviously not trying to pass it off as truth.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  Given that I've never heard of the Stanford Federalist Society, I would be unable to identify this as satire. It's presented as any other official flyer from that organisation might be. In a way, it's defamation - a false statement (in its accreditation) that harms the organisation's reputation. For some people, this will be their first experience of that organisation, and those people have no reason to take it as satire.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Please join the Stanford Federalist Society as we welcome Senator Joshua Hawley and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to discuss violent insurrection. Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government. Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government. Senator Hawley will argue that the ends justify the means. Attorney General Paxton will explain that when the Supreme Court refuses to exercise its Article III authority to overturn the results of a free and fair election, calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol represents an appropriate alternative remedy. This is dripping in satire. Pretty hard to miss.

wheaties 5y ago

This seems to be the growing trend of anything happening online or within media outlets. "We hold these rights as sacrosanct for all people ...unless they use those rights against causes or people for which we support, including us!"

djrogers 5y ago

Once again, FIRE doing great work in helping school administrators realize when they’ve crossed a line. I strongly urge everyone to support them.

bilbo0s 5y ago
Even better, support the ACLU. They will fight for people even if they are not privileged enough to be in higher education.
- javagram 5y ago
  The ACLU is more of a partisan organization aligned with the democrats nowadays. Good or bad, it has been great for their fundraising. (Of course the same has happened to many other groups which have switched to being partisan aligned on one side or another) EFF and FIRE seem more similar to the “old” ACLU although both have very limited missions.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The ACLU is more of a partisan organization aligned with the democrats nowadays. In that as the set of political realignments that started with the New Deal, got new direction from the Civil Rights movement and the response to it, and completed around the mid-1990s wound up, the Republicans, who were not consistently so before the realignment, ended up firmly opposed to both core principles of the ACLU and, as a tribal identity marker, the ACLU itseld (heck, even in the 1980s, Republicans used a Democratic candidate being a “card carrying member of the ACLU” as an attack.) The ACLU didn't really go anywhere, the national partisan alignment shifted so that the positions it always held were partisan.
    - javagram 5y ago
      Disagree based on the reporting I’ve read. Actually just saw another reported piece from the NYT pop up on this, but I’ve seen others in the same vein previously which informed my comment. “Once a Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis: An organization that has defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is split by an internal debate over whether supporting progressive causes is more important” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

HarryHirsch 5y ago

My chemistry teacher at school (that was in Europe) once lost it over someone who had vandalised an election poster. Elections were coming up, and someone had vandalized a poster from the Socialists. Dude himself was part of the right lunatic fringe himself, but (maybe because of that) the constitutional right of political expression was sacred to him. And here in the US you need to engage in discussion with your betters about your right to political speech. It's disheartening, it really is.

compiler-guy 5y ago

Worth noting that the organization that came to the satirist’s defense, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “FIRE” took a principled stand here. In other cases, it sides with the Federalist Society which comes under criticism from the left. For example, the Rutgers law school student bar association had required all organizations under it to have sessions on CRT, but FIRE threatened to sue and they relented. https://www.thefire.org/victory-facing-public-pressure-rutgers-law-student-bar-association-rescinds-critical-race-theory-requirement/ https://www.thefire.org/victory-facing-public-pressure-rutge...

stronglikedan 5y ago
Sounds like they have good principles.
- mynegation 5y ago
  Whether one agrees with their principles or not, that was an absolute power move. If one is on the fence - would you rather associate with organization like this or a side that shuts down any opportunity for a discourse.
  - BitwiseFool 5y ago
    I would much rather stand with the principled institution. That being said, the opposing institution that uses it's resources to shut down opportunities for discourse will probably end up being more powerful and successful in propagating it's ideology in the long-run. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
  - stronglikedan 5y ago
    I'm personally always for discourse, whether I'm dealing with a principled institution or not. I'm the type that will usually side against the issuer of an ultimatum. Although, I loathe hypocrisy, so will usually side with a principled institution over the alternative. I guess it really depends on the situation. The devil is in the details or some such something or other. The best part of being a centrist is that everyone else naturally hates me, so it's easy to pick one side or the other in each individual situation, with no loyalties.

Mizza 5y ago

> The student alleged that Wallace’s satire “defamed” the Stanford Federalist Society, causing “harm” to the student group and to the “individual reputations” of the officers. This reminds of me of the case of 'Hustler Magazine v. Falwell', detailed in the film 'The People vs. Larry Flynt'. The court affirmed, unanimously, that with regard to public figures and organizations, people_do_ have the right to try to cause harm and damage to their reputations. And why shouldn't we? In the case of satire, that's exactly the point.

ffggvv 5y ago

meanwhile if a conservative posted a flyer the whole school and media and rainbow-hairs would be dancing in ecstasy cheering that the hateful bigot was removed

meepmorp 5y ago
Your personal sense of grievance probably doesn't have the predictive power you think it does.

phlakaton 5y ago

This is one in a grand history of parody flyers and papers on campus. The Chapparal used to love taking the mickey out of the Stanford Daily by printing up fake papers and dropping them in the Daily’s newspaper racks around campus on one of their off days. Stories were told of the Daily staffers running madly around campus trying to remove them. The student LGBT organization responded to an infamous two-page spread published by the Stanford Review about the evils of homosexuality with a none-too-polite two-page spread of their own. The only thing that might have been improved in this case: a disclaimer at the bottom. I’m amused a law student didn’t think to include that.

hackeraccount 5y ago

Being principled when the outcome agrees with your politics is no harder then being unprincipled when it disagrees with them.

findjashua 5y ago

Free speech for me, but not for thee