UCI’s Rehiring Ensures Liberal Slant

The decision to rehire uber-liberal lawyer Erwin Chemerinsky as founding dean of UC Irvine’s new law school by Chancellor Michael Drake was a mistake of historic proportion.

I am not here to criticize Drake or to even try to understand the labyrinth of three-level chess he has to play to navigate in the largest publicly funded university system in the world.

But this decision will set UCI’s law school on the road to becoming one of the most liberal law schools in the nation.

Erwin Chemerinsky is not being hired to be a professor at an existing law school where he can spout off his liberal views.

He is being hired as the founding dean of a new, yet-to-be-formed public law school.

The founding dean is the person around whom the school is built, as in any new organization, whether academic, business or social; it is formed and guided by its leadership. Chemerinsky is the leader Drake has chosen.

What kind of professors do you think he will hire, liberal or conservative? Will they be professors who believe in the actual words of the Constitution, or like him, believe that the Constitution is some living, breathing document that has to be reinterpreted as time goes on?

Do you think they will be professors who think that lower courts should use decision from the United States Supreme Court, or should they also use cases and opinions from foreign courts that do not have the Constitution as a hindrance in their decision?

This is a man who has been a board member for the ACLU for more than 10 years. He has worked to get “Under God” taken out of our Pledge of Allegiance and fought to have a cross taken out of Los Angeles County’s “City of Angels” seal, even though the city was founded by Christian missionaries.

He does not believe in the death penalty no matter how heinous the crime; he fought against the three-strikes law; and when it comes to national defense, he thinks that every enemy combatant should have the full protection of the Constitution — even in the time of war, no matter what danger it poses to our men and women fighting in harm’s way.

What amazes me is hearing extremely educated individuals, mostly with law degrees, explain to us less-educated proletariat how hiring one of the most polarizing left-wing lawyers in America as a founding dean will make no difference in what type of law school UCI creates. He is not just liberal. He is polarizing.

Now I already know what he and his supporters will say. “We do not pick law professors based on their politics; we just pick the best qualified professors.”

If you believe that, you must either be a lawyer or have some other advanced degree that removed your common sense. It has been known to happen that in higher education any bit of common sense you might have after college will be completely removed by some liberal professor in grad school.

That’s the same argument bandied about whenever a president puts forward a new justice to the Supreme Court. “All we care about is if they are qualified.”

Baloney. We care about how they think and they learn how to think in law school.

I am not saying that Chemerinsky would not be sincere in trying to create a non-ideological law school. It’s just that, because he is who he is, he can’t. The pool of talent he will attract will be left-leaning because that’s who he is.

How many conservative law professors would want to work full time for him? Would you want to be in an environment in which your superior is against everything that you believe in?

Clearly the pool he will have to pick from will be more likely liberal than conservative.

Sending our best and brightest to a law school run by an extremely liberal dean and faculty and asserting it will not affect the type of lawyers it produces is like jumping in a pool and not expecting to get wet.

It can’t happen.