Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) urged the Texas State Bar to look carefully at the fitness of some Stanford Law School alumni after an outcry over a conservative judge’s speaking engagement on campus.
Cruz said in a letter to Texas officials that there was a “fundamental” question about whether the students who protested the appearance of Kyle Duncan, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit circuit judge, were “eligible to practice law” in Texas.
“The notion that these future attorneys will find it acceptable to harass and insult a session judge boggles the mind, and seriously raises the question as to whether these students respect the role of the judge, or their temperament to practice law,” he said in a letter Thursday to Texas Chief Justice Nathan Hecht and Augustine Rivera, president of the Texas Board of Legal Investigators.
“In fact, these students’ outbursts raise a valid question as to whether they can be trusted to advocate dispassionately for clients who may have different ideological views than their own,” Cruz writes.
Duncan visited Stanford Law School to participate in an event called “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: COVID, Guns, and Twitter.”
Cruz said Duncan didn’t get a chance to “speak meaningfully” as he was “shouted at by the Stanford students.”
The Stanford student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, reported that members of the public protested Duncan’s appearance before and during his lecture. The newspaper reported that dissidents protesting Duncan’s appearance placed fliers around campus arguing that Duncan pushed for laws that harm women, immigrants, and LGBT people.
Cruz said protesters constantly interrupted Duncan, calling him a racist and shouting “obscene sexual insults”.
The Stanford Daily reported that the dean of the law school denounced the protest in an email to the school’s community, saying that what happened was inconsistent with the institution’s “commitment to free speech.”
“The school is reviewing what happened and will work to ensure that protocols are in place so that disturbances of this kind do not occur again, and are committed to conducting events on terms consistent with our disruption policy and principles of freedom of expression,” said Dean Jenny Martinez.
Cruz said the Texas Board of Directors should “take a special interest” in students graduating from Stanford Law School in 2023, 2024, and 2025. Those students should be forced to declare in writing if they have participated in the protest, and the Texas Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court should The board decides what the “appropriate remedy” should be.
“Texas deserve only the best advocates as their advisors, and those who engage in shouting and shouting titles to make their case are not the best,” he said.
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