Law prof who publicly trashed Scalia shows ‘utter lack of intellectual diversity’ at Georgetown

Conservative and libertarian students at Georgetown Law Center have learned without question that they will face discrimination from their own professors.

That’s according to an email by Profs. Randy Barnett and Nick Rosenkranz to the law school community, posted at Above the Law, in response to Prof. Gary Peller’s very public trashing of newly deceased Justice Antonin Scalia.

Peller not only violated Georgetown Law rules by blasting his “callous” message to the entire law school, say Barnett and Rosenkranz (who got permission from Dean William Treanor to send their message), but he did so in full knowledge – as Peller privately told Barnett – that he would “cause … hurt [to] those with affection for J. Scalia”:

Prof. Peller forwarded his email and Prof. Seidman’s [another public Scalia critic] to the entire student body at Georgetown Law, some 2000 students. Of those, at least a few hundred are conservative or libertarian. These students received an email yesterday, from a Georgetown Law professor, just three days after the death of Justice Scalia, which said, in effect, your hero was a stupid bigot and we are not sad that he is dead.

There is only one lesson such students can take away from Peller’s email and the non-response from law faculty:

Some of them are twenty-two year-old 1Ls, less than six months into their legal education. … Leaders of the Federalist Society chapter and of the student Republicans reached out to us to tell us how traumatized, hurt, shaken, and angry, were their fellow students. Of particular concern to them were the students who are in Professor Peller’s class who must now attend class knowing of his contempt for Justice Scalia and his admirers, including them. How are they now to participate freely in class? What reasoning would be deemed acceptable on their exams?

Considering that Peller’s email soon went up on “Tikkun Daily, a website for which he writes, under his bi-line,” it was clearly his intent “to generate a public controversy, with him at its center,” the duo wrote:

The “hurt [to] those with affection for J. Scalia” – including hundreds of Georgetown students – was either intended by him or was acceptable collateral damage.

As Rosenkranz told Dean Treanor in the wake of Peller’s campuswide email, “this incident is symptomatic of a larger problem in academia: the utter lack of intellectual diversity among faculty, and the deep intolerance for views that dissent from the liberal orthodoxy”:

This incident can only be understood against that backdrop. There are some people on earth who should not be mourned when they die. Adolf Hitler was such a person. Justice Scalia was not. (See, for example, the moving tributes by Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)

The problem is that the center of gravity of legal academia is so far to the left edge of the political spectrum that some have lost the ability to tell the difference. Only on a faculty with just two identifiably right-of-center professors out of 125, could a professor harbor such vitriol for a conservative Justice that even Justice Ginsburg adored.

They noted the drastically different response to a faculty member sending a critical email at Yale (Erika Christakis and the Halloween-costume kerfuffle), only that incident was criticism of political correctness: