As I pointed out Monday, some on the left were arguing that Judge Duncan’s speech wasn’t really disrupted, either because he didn’t really have a prepared speech or because he could have delivered it that day but chose not to. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern specifically downplayed the disruption. But it was impossible to fact check his version of events because, at the time, a full recording of the event hadn’t been released.
Today, David Lat released the full audio of the incident and I agree with him that it shows the speech was disrupted in a way that violated the school’s speech policy even before Dean Steinbach took the podium. Here’s Lat’s take on the recording:
- 0:35: Judge Duncan takes the podium, as students make gagging noises, and attempts to deliver his prepared remarks. And it’s clear he does have prepared remarks, focused on high-profile rulings of the Fifth Circuit in specific areas of law where Supreme Court jurisprudence is unsettled. He’s heckled intermittently—e.g., “Boring!” or “We took Con Law!”—but he’s able to speak to a certain degree. It’s not as much of a shutdown as Ilya Shapiro at Hastings. But at least in my opinion—and now that we have full audio, we can have an informed debate—the protestors did violate Stanford University’s Policy on Campus Disruptions, which prohibits “[p]revent[ing] or disrupt[ing] the effective carrying out of a University function or approved activity, such as… public events.” The policy doesn’t prohibit “preventing the carrying out” of a public event; it prohibits “preventing or disrupting the effective carrying out” of a public event, and the words “disrupting” and “effective” should be given some meaning.
- 7:10: “The depth of contempt that you are showing me….” This is where Judge Duncan first diverges from his prepared remarks to criticize the protesters. From this point forward, it gets more difficult to hear because the frequency and volume of the heckling increase.
I’ve listened to the all but the last few minutes. There’s a moment around 5 1/2 minutes in where for almost a minute it seems as if the heckling might die down and Judge Duncan may indeed be able to give his prepared speech. He’s definitely making headway. Then he mentions a vaccine and someone loudly interjects “Do you want people to die from COVID?!” He ignores that but gets interrupted several more times and finally after a longer interruption he seems to give up and goes off script (at 7:10). From there on it’s only a few minutes before he calls for an administrator and Dean Steinbach shows up to give her speech which goes until about 19 minutes into the recording.
After dean Steinbach’s speech Judge Duncan never gets back on track. There’s more heckling and this time Judge Duncan is responding to the students and directly criticizing their behavior. He’s met by more jeering.
25:10: Judge Duncan asks the audience, after one of them notes that they asked FedSoc to cancel the event, “Why do you want to cancel people’s speech?” He goes on to condemn the protest as “infantile” and “ridiculous.”
26:38: Judge Duncan asks the audience when was the last time a FedSoc member showed up to one of their events to heckle a speaker. An audience member responds, “We’re not attacking their rights.” (Well, maybe their right to put on an event without disruption….)
It’s only after this that one of the student organizers talks over Judge Duncan and says “Okay, let’s just let him finish his rant in complete silence so he can get that out and it can go in the newspaper or whatever, just pointed silence until the Q&A.” Again, we’re 27 minutes in at this point and he’s maybe given 4-5 minutes of his speech (if that). After a few seconds of silence Judge Duncan says “Fine, go to the Q&A.” One of the protesters shouts, “It worked!”
As Lat suggests in his introduction, not everyone will see this recording the same way but I think any reasonable person would agree that a seemingly endless stream of loud interruptions plus a 7-minute-long prepared speech by the DEI dean is a disruption which prevented Judge Duncan from effectively carrying out his remarks. Yes he did get in a few words, maybe up to a minute at one point early on but that doesn’t undo all of the other heckling which clearly dragged him off track.
Discussion about this post