You’d have to laugh at how rightwing/conservative, whatever you want to call them, websites and “media” (term loosely used!) have turned another molehill into a mountain ..
This from legal insurrection whilst world war 3 is on the doorstep
Sorry, I’ll rely on the evidence, not the “official” version by a law school administration, particularly not one which has exhibited unseemly hostility to the Federalist Society and conservative students.
This is not a mere flip of the coin, in which reasonable people could reasonably reach different factual conclusions. John Sexton at HotAir has a pretty comprehensive overview of the evidence demonstrating the unreliability of attempts by Stern and others to downplay the disruption and why there is substantial evidence from neutral sources that the disruption was even worse than the Free Beacon originally reported.
Chief among those neutral sources was Yale Law alumnus David Lat, who tweeted audio portions and also revealed at his substack the results of his own investigation and sources (emphasis added):
[UPDATE (10:25 p.m.): Based on what I have heard from additional sources, as well as video and audio I have reviewed, I now believe that the disruption of the event was longer and more intense than described in the preceding paragraph. The noisy protest continued, at varying levels of intensity, throughout most if not all of the proceedings. This made it difficult for audience members to hear or focus upon the speakers at times, and it even disrupted classes and a faculty meeting taking place in other parts of the building. This new information doesn’t really change my analysis of the free-speech issues discussed below—except to perhaps reinforce my conclusions—but I note it for the record. It also explains why, a few paragraphs down, I have replaced “disruption” with “getting completely canceled.” The event was significantly disrupted, even if it wasn’t totally canceled à la Hastings and managed to limp to a conclusion.]
Lat then expanded on what he found:
[UPDATE (3/18/2022, 11:28 a.m.): For more details on just how disruptive the protest was—not just to the FedSoc event, but everything going on at YLS at the time—please see my Twitter thread.]
Here are some of those tweets (emphasis added):
2/ It wasn’t just the event that was disrupted.
Classes were disrupted too, including Federal Courts (Judith Resnik) and Advanced Legal Writing (Rob Harrison).
The latter was in Room 121—the room farthest away from Room 127, where the event took place.
3/ Students in Federal Courts, across the hall from the event, reported that “the floor was shaking” and Professor Resnik asked on-call students to “yell” so they could be heard over the din.
4/ A student in a classroom who was taking a test on an entirely different floor of the building could even hear the noise from the protest.
In other words, it wasn’t just limited to the first floor.
5/ The protesters did block the main hallway of YLS, at least for a time. See photo: [here]
6/ A faculty meeting—the job talk of Professor Claudia Flores, a Latinx legal scholar whose work focuses on international human rights and inequality—was disrupted.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to restart it, the meeting had to be moved to Zoom.
7/ In my opinion, the YLS protesters should apologize to Professor Flores, whose job talk was collateral damage for their rowdy and rude protest.
(I suspect that many of them would support having a Latinx professor of human rights law on the faculty.)
8/ In the room for Professor Flores’s job talk was @YaleLawSch Dean Heather Gerken.
Attendees kept looking at @GerkenHeather, expecting her to go out and say something to the protesters—but she did nothing.
9/ Yes, I know, the dynamic duo of Dean of Students Ellen Cosgrove & DEI Director Yaseen Eldik were on the scene.
But having Dean Gerken herself come out to confront the protesters would have been far more powerful—& might have succeeded in quieting them.
If you’ve got this far and you really want to read more be our guest…
