In what might be the most embarrassing legal and academic event of the year, the legal eagles at the Columbia Law Review have demanded that the law school cancel exams.

The reason: When helmeted riot cops cleared the campus of more than 100 crazed, anti-Israel protesters, the law students were traumatized. Tears abounded. The snowflakes melted. They were “irrevocably shaken.”

And if the school doesn’t cancel exams, then all grades must be pass or fail.

The demand is no surprise. Law schools — and Columbia is no exception — are dominated by leftist ideologues. 

The Demand

The hysterical demand is a sadly amusing commentary not only on the students, but also on the law school, which, again, is arable soil for growing leftist legal crazies watered with the ideology of victimology.

“The violence we witnessed last night has irrevocably shaken many of us on the Review,” the second paragraph of the ridiculous demand begins:

We know this to be the same for a majority of our classmates. Videos have circulated of police clad in riot gear mocking and brutalizing our students. The events of the last night left us, and many of our peers, unable to focus and highly emotional during this tumultuous time. This only follows the growing distress that many of us have felt for months as a humanitarian crisis abroad continues to unfold, and as the blatant antisemitism, islamophobia, and racism on campus have escalated. Our response is not disproportionate to the outsized impact it has had on many of us in the community — a crowd of people that proudly represent their membership in a white supremacist, neo-fascist hate group were storming our campus just days ago.

Noting that 74.2 percent of the law students support “mandatory Pass/Fail” and that the administration has refused to honor a request for it, the editors claimed that the Review “simply cannot function if our students are not well.” The editors are prioritizing health and safety over academic achievements because many students “are unwell … and cannot study or concentrate while their peers are being hauled to jail.”

Thus, “canceling exams would be a proportionate response to the level of distress our peers have been feeling.” While “making courses mandatory Pass/Fail would be the next most equitable solution,” many potential employers will discriminate against students without real grades.

Response

A more likely reason for the Review’s demand is that students simply don’t want to study to get good grades. Or risk getting bad ones.

But that aside, the funny thing is that, as the New York Post reported, 134 of the 282 protesters hauled off the campuses of Columbia and City College early this week had “zero affiliation” with the schools:

Of the 112 protesters arrested at the Ivy League university, 80 were students and 32 were not affiliated with the school.

At the publicly-funded City College, only 68 of the 170 booked were students, while the remaining 102 were outsiders.

Some were professional protesters, the Post reported, including 40-year-old anarchist James Carlson. He could face a hate-crime charge for burning an Israeli flag at Columbia on April 21.

Carlson’s arrest record, which the Post also revealed, suggests he is a violent maniac:

In 2005, Carlson was charged with suspicion of attempted lynching and aggravated assault on a police officer after allegedly trying to set a cop’s car on fire during a protest in San Francisco, which left the officer with a serious head injury, NYPD sources said.

He was also allegedly involved in protests in January that blocked off entrances to the Holland Tunnel and the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, sources said.

Beyond that quibble, however, is the truth about the Review and law schools in general.

The Review’s editrix is one Alexandria Iraheta Sousa, “a second-year law student who has worked for numerous progressive nonprofits, including a dark money group, Demand Justice, that advocates court packing,” the Washington Free Beacon revealed.

Administrative Enslavement, an article in the Review, argued that “in 2020, there were at least 600,000 slaves in the United States. They cooked. They cleaned. They did building maintenance and repair work. Some fought fires. And others, harking back to an age most thought long past, even picked cotton.”

They are “slaves,” the author argued, because an exception to the federal Constitution’s 13th Amendment that forbids chattel slavery permits prisoners to be drafted for work.

Columbia is not alone.

In his commentary on the Review’s preposterous demand, liberal law professor Jonathan Turley wrote that Stanford law students don’t much care for free speech. 

Last year, Judge Stuart Duncan of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tried to speak on campus at the invitation of the campus Federalist Society. But leftist “students decided that allowing a conservative judge to speak on campus is intolerable and set about to ‘deplatform’ him by shouting him down,” Turley wrote.

Duncan planned to speak on “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” He couldn’t, thanks to the students. 

Instead of stopping the infantile behavior, a dean joined the students in attacking Duncan. Tirien Steinbach — the dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, not surprisingly — “launched into a babbling attack on the judge.” Per Turley:

Steinbach explained “I had to write something down because I am so uncomfortable up here. And I don’t say that for sympathy, I just say that I am deeply, deeply uncomfortable.”

Steinbach declared “It’s uncomfortable to say that for many people here, your work has caused harm.” After a perfunctory nod to free speech, Steinbach proceeded to eviscerate it to the delight of the law students. She continued “again I still ask, is the juice worth the squeeze?” “Is it worth the pain that this causes, the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people.”

Steinbach resigned shortly after what should have been an embarrassing moment for the school.

Noting that professors have told law students for years that they are “fragile, vulnerable victims,” Turley wrote that life is “neither predictable nor comfortable.”

Clients’ lives are “often falling apart,” and so lawyers must be strong, and “cannot ask judges for postponements to allow us to process the stress of the moment.”

Just as they shouldn’t ask Columbia to cancel exams.

Concluded Turley, “The response from Columbia Law School should be simple: see you at the exams.”