REVIEW: ‘Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites’ by Ilya Shapiro
If you thought law students hijacking classes for inane exercises in “naming the violence” was bad, just wait. While my law school experience did not involve scandals of national interest, it was punctuated by students attempting to do anything—lecture, agitate, yell—except learn from others.
Here’s one story I’ll never forget, from the same criminal law class where my classmates pestered their uber-progressive professor to say she thought rape was wrong. We were studying the 1971 revolt at Attica state prison in New York, which left 10 prison workers and 33 inmates dead. Prosecutors subsequently chose not to press charges against corrections officers who had allegedly brutalized and possibly murdered some of the rioters. The episode gave a panorama view of the issues we cover in criminal law, such as theories of punishment, prosecutorial discretion, and self-defense.
Who needs to ask difficult questions, though, when you smell an opportunity to signal your progressive bona fides? One of my classmates raised a Zoom hand, but when called on did not ask a question. Instead, she began to read the “Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands” verbatim and in full. While it is mostly very reasonable and sympathetic, the manifesto is quite long. When she finished reading it, my classmate, having worked herself into a feverish state over the several minutes she spent reading, added with a scream that racialized capitalism was responsible for the mistreatment of the inmates. Only a revolution would fix things. Some classmates chimed in over Zoom chat to applaud this act of bravery. The professor thanked the young woman who had interrupted her. The only time Attica came up again for the rest of the course was when we learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese, whose story has wrongly come to stand for the idea that bystanders will fail to intervene if they think others will—because Genovese’s rapist and murderer had participated in the uprising.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
Photo by Tom Werner/ Getty Images
