November 13, 2005
Who cares what we think?
Dan Solove and Tim Johnson discuss today's Yale coverage in the New York Times, the gist of which is that some students and faculty like Alito and some do not, largely in proportion to their underlying political allegiances.
In response to the sense (although nobody in the article seems to be quoted as actually having this view, rather than attributing it to unnamed others) that Judge Bork and Justice Thomas were "betrayed" when Yale failed to turn out in support of them, Solove writes:
s Yale Law School supposted to support every graduate nominated for the Supreme Court or running for political office? Is this a duty that a law school owes its alumni? I think not. The faculty and students of a law school should decide on the merits of the Alito nomination without putting a special thumb on the scale because he has a connection to the school.
Now of course this is right. But I should note a corollary to it. This view-- that faculty and students should express their views independently of their institutional loyalties-- presupposes and depends on them not claiming to speak for the institution of Yale, and not claiming special authority on the question merely because they share a diploma or a hallway with the nominee.
The anti-Alito student group whose founders are interviewed in the Times article did seem to be trying to gain special traction in the early days by dint of coming from Yale, and indeed, the article appears to be premised on the idea that the division over Alito at Yale is more interesting or relevant than the division in Cambridge or Chicago or Palo Alto or Manhattan.
Now if one believes that Yale students do or ought to form their opinions about the Alito nomination independent of any institutional connection they feel, it is a mystery why one should care what Yale students think of the Alito nomination, other than the fact that we are a bunch of more or less randomly chosen overachievers who aced the LSAT.
UPDATE: Professor Tom Smith concurs, in typically funny dudgeon.
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