Law Schools

Law School Students Just Saw A Radical Shift In The Pathway To Success

Conservatism has long offered the path of least resistance for law students. That may be changing.

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A number of law students, and perhaps more importantly, a number of pre-law students, just witnessed a major event that could drastically alter the course of their careers, and many aren’t savvy enough to have noticed it.

For decades, the most powerful affirmative action program in America has been the one aimed at identifying and promoting young conservatives in the law. With conservatives increasingly outnumbered in educated circles, the ranks of prestigious federal clerkships, legislative internships, and plum government lawyer jobs have to be filled from an ever-shrinking pool. Because despite the numbers shifting away from conservatives long ago, the number of legislative positions and judicial clerkships that they need to fill keeps going up. This path was never going to appeal to everyone, but if you were the sort of student who liked to play the numbers, joining up with the conservatives was always the right play for your career.

It’s how you get Regent Law grads in senior Justice Department jobs.

Long ago, a proper conservative could enter this track merely sporting their “Robert Bork was Robbed” button everywhere. But for the last two decades, earning one’s way into this professional express lane has increasingly required students be both contrarian and confrontational on college and law school campuses to publicly demonstrate the depth of their commitment. Embracing the fact that no one likes them as a badge of their “victimhood” while inviting race-baiting provocateurs to campus, pranking Take Back The Night marches, and, yes, writing op-eds mocking minority groups were just the first steps on the right-wing cursus honorum. The next crop of conservative judicial nominees is inviting Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro to campus as we speak.

This is what makes the withdrawal of Ryan Bounds’s nomination such a profound moment for law students. The 45-year-old nominee for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had done everything right. He’d served in the Justice Department and he’d held a prestigious clerkship. But in all of these jobs he carried his right-wing credentials with him, forged in part by his willingness to write those contrarian and confrontational op-eds as an undergraduate unleashing a litany of racially and sexually insensitive remarks.

Bounds apologized for his statements at his Senate hearing and pointed to diversity efforts he’d made throughout his professional life as evidence that he was no longer defined by his college essays mocking racial minorities for laughs. David Lat says Ryan Bounds is not a racist. That could be true. People do, mercifully, mature. But these essays Bounds wrote were definitely racist and it’s cynical, bone-headed, or both to argue otherwise.

Yet, tellingly, his right-wing supporters never fully endorsed his approach of confronting his past. Even Lat’s take on this tried to write off phrases like “feel-good ethnic hoedowns” as not even racist in the first place, which takes some wild gymnastics. Ed Whelan of the National Review took to social media to minimize the extent of Bounds’s college statements, ignoring most of the record to defend only the statements where Bounds listed slurs used within oppressed communities for each other — proving he can’t be as racist as the black people… apparently? Ilya Shapiro of the CATO Institute tweeted of the Bounds apology that “[t]here was nothing to apologize for but he had to do that because that’s the way the game is played.” It seems as though Shapiro felt the nominee was lying to the Senate, which would open a whole other can of worms.

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But it’s worth noting that the withdrawal of the Ryan Bounds nomination stings conservatives more than an ordinary speedbump on their path to judicial dominance. After all, the White House will move on to the next young conservative to fill the seat. What really has conservatives worked up is the fact that the Bounds nomination was derailed by a plethora of racially and sexually inappropriate statements. Their protestations over the “injustice” of judging a nominee by his college days are so fierce because they know everyone else on their judicial wish list has a similar paper trail of offensive college works waiting to be discovered.

This, to borrow a phrase, is the way the game is played. Conservatives have spent decades encouraging and rewarding college and law students for the very trollish antics that landed Bounds in hot water. Then, as years go by, these young firebrands soften their public image. The childish hijinks to “own the libs” that earned them acclaim from their right-wing patrons as kids transition into disproportionately harsh sentencing recommendations and academic articles about the folly of the Fourteenth Amendment. They become pillars of the local legal community and bide their time until the day they get the call to serve as a federal judge. By the time the Senate confirmation hearing rolls around, they want George Will on the streets and Rush Limbaugh in the sheets.

The key to this whole system was the willingness of polite society to ignore the coarseness of youth. To sign on to the myth that what nominees wrote back then shouldn’t matter — even if what they wrote back then played an outsized influence on their professional career. Even if what they wrote back then could be the only unfiltered insight into the nominee’s brain after decades of professional nurturing from people who think faking apologies is acceptable Senate testimony.

Someone was finally held accountable for the playing the enfant terrible that the right-wing adored for years. The well-worn path looks less primrose today.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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