Yale Law School’s leaders are begging the university to stop playing footsie with fascism. Yale Law students agree.
The dean and members of the faculty reportedly made behind-the-scenes overtures to university leaders to stop trying to negotiate with the Department of Justice to settle discrimination claims brought against the school as part of a wave of claims against institutions of higher learning designed to bully universities into signing over independence to a handful of MAGAratchiks. The law school feels that its world-class legal scholars have valuable insights into safeguarding the rule of law. The university’s leadership so far seems more interested in advice from counsel that already surrendered so badly in University of Virginia’s similar case that the former president and general counsel publicly suggested that the firm — appointed by the state’s Republican then-AG — was really working for the government to undermine the school’s legal rights.
So… Yale Law professors or a firm accused of a deeply disturbing conflict? Tough choice!
Yale Law students, student organizations, and recent graduates have signed a letter also calling upon the university to stop negotiating against itself by talking settlement with the DOJ. It begins with — what should be — the first rule of litigation.
First, there are no findings against Yale Law School. The Department of Justice has not completed its inquiry, has accused the School of no wrongdoing, and has given it nothing to contest. A settlement now would concede claims that have never been made and accept sanction without process. Do not obey in advance.
Yes! Do not talk settlement when the government hasn’t even managed to string together a coherent finding yet. This does not take law students from the school with the lowest acceptance rate in the country to figure out. There are third-tier law schools that could give that advice for free.
The DOJ did issue findings against the medical school in May — findings that Yale’s AAUP chapter investigated with help from Sher Tremonte and found “bogus — cherry-picked, statistically weak” — but nothing against the greater university or any of its other schools. The centerpiece of this DOJ magnum opus was a 2024 admissions slide titled “Admissions post-SCOTUS.” The slide is otherwise blank. From that blank slide, the DOJ divined that admissions staff must be receiving secret verbal instructions to continue considering race after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action programs in admissions. Sher Tremonte’s lawyers noted the obvious, which is that the inference “is based on pure speculation.”
Yale President Maurie McInnis issued a statement this morning attempting to put out the fire that everyone with a legal education keeps asking her to put out. After admitting that the government has only issued findings regarding the medical school and all other inquiries are “pending,” she wrote:
These investigations concern university compliance with federal law; specifically, a federal statute, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court required colleges and universities across the country, including Yale, to adhere to new legal standards in admissions in its 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. As a university committed to the rule of law, we take that obligation seriously.
This is cowardly bullshit. The DOJ is not acting in good faith, and pretending like it is disgraces the university. The only statement Yale’s leadership should put out is “The DOJ is lobbing frivolous claims in a blatant effort to intimidate the university into compromising its academic freedom and professional educational judgment. Yale has done nothing wrong, and we will vigorously fight these false claims.”
Instead, she wrote this tripe. Anything short of that is just like out doughnuts to stay on the good side of the secret police.
The students, in their letter, flag this:
Second, the record of peer settlements counsels against trust. Recent agreements have bound universities to vague and shifting definitions of prohibited conduct, imposed certification regimes that expose individual administrators and students to personal liability, and installed the federal government as a standing overseer of academic judgment. As scholars Serena Mayeri and Amanda Shanor reviewing those agreements have warned, such deals purchase not peace but a conditional reprieve of uncertain duration, revocable whenever the government demands change.
This is exactly what happened with UVA when they were represented McGuireWoods. As UVA’s former counsel put it, the school was “saddled with counsel aligned with the other side.” But in that case, the firm was appointed by the state’s Republican AG. Yale is a private school and doesn’t have to choose a law firm that might have such overlapping interests… but they chose to be represented by McGuireWoods anyway.
That decision tells you everything you need to know about where this matter is going. The university is interested in bootlicking and sought out a law firm that’s successfully licked the same boot.
When McInnis calls the process “required and reasonable,” it is neither. Let the DOJ bring a claim — or at least some colorable findings — before offering up the school’s independence in a shakedown.
Senator Richard Blumenthal — Yale Law ’73, and Connecticut’s attorney general for two decades before that — told a recent roundtable with Yale students held outside a law school that he’d been told “very reliably” that the school has made a second settlement proposal after the DOJ already rejected the school’s first gratuitous proposal.
It’s the Lando Effect in fast forward. The university is showing its belly and the DOJ is already asking for more. That is not “required and reasonable.” It’s just embarrassing. “There’s no excuse for a settlement right now,” Blumenthal said. Yale’s rival Harvard has played hardball and won. Even if Harvard eventually takes a settlement down the road, which it shouldn’t, it would be negotiating from the strength that comes from successfully bloodying the bully’s nose first. Meanwhile every institution that caves to Trump — Columbia, UVA, a gaggle of Biglaw firms — just get hit again anyway. Appeasing this administration only teaches it that there’s more it can take.
You’d think a professor of history might recognize how this pattern always plays out, but McInnis is a professor of “the History of Art.” Like, what are we doing here? Just say “Art History” like normal people.
McInnis’s statement notes that “I am seeing speculation and misinformation spreading,” but does not flag what, precisely, is untrue. That Yale volunteered a settlement as the state’s sitting senator says? That the law school is pushing back against the settlement talks? The letter confirms that there are still no findings against any entity but the medical school, so it’s not that.
The students also highlight the particular impact the university’s pusillanimity — to use the sort of unnecessarily fancy word a Yale alum like Bill Buckley would choose — will have upon them.
Third, we are the ones who will live under whatever is signed. For us, the students, none of this is abstract. The admissions process now on the bargaining table is the process that assembled the community we learn from every day. Our classmates come to Yale Law School as military veterans, as immigrants, as organizers, as government aid recipients, as the first in their family to attend college—to list but a few elements of our peers’ backgrounds. We benefit from their experiences in and beyond the classroom.
Right. The student body that makes Yale an elite institution thrives on its admissions policy and the government just wants to strip out one diversity enhancement to make more room for more mediocre white kids and legacy admissions… which is also, because of its backward looking nature, overwhelmingly white affirmative action.
The opening instruction of the student letter — “Do not obey in advance” — comes from Timothy Snyder, who wrote it as Lesson One of On Tyranny while a professor at Yale. A reminder of what Yale can be.
The law students are now saying the same thing. So are the faculty. So are alumni. So are Mayor Justin Elicker and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. Ditto Senator Blumenthal. Count in AAUP co-counsel Marisol Orihuela too, who asked Yale to do the radical thing of making “the Department of Justice prove its allegations if it even can.” Basically every constituency in the Yale orbit seems to get this except the people doing the negotiating. As alum and rightful FTC Commissioner Becca Slaughter put it to the Yale Daily News, “it cannot be that I, Becca, normal human, had the wherewithal to challenge something that was wrong and an abuse of power, and Yale — with its $44 billion endowment — does not,” Dip a few hundredths of a percent into that $44 billion endowment and hire a law firm to make the DOJ prove its case. They’re the institution that’s short-staffed! Yale doesn’t just have the right side of the facts, they’re in the rarified position of having the right side of the resources in a fight against the federal fucking government.
The math is simple. The law is simple. The art history should be simple.
Earlier: Yale Law School Begging Yale University To Find Its Spine Against Donald Trump
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
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