Nation’s most partisan judges announce blackballing of students in retaliation for the protests of students they despise
By 
Cancel culture is real!
Against the backdrop of campus protests, a group of federal judges appointed by former President Donald Trump say they will blackball graduates of Columbia University, ratcheting up a pressure campaign against schools they deem hostile to conservatives.
In a letter this week to Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, 13 jurists led by U.S. Circuit Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch said the New York City school’s response to pro-Palestinian protests was inadequate and that the campus had become an “incubator of bigotry” with rampant antisemitism and a lack of diverse perspectives.
“Considering recent events, and absent extraordinary change, we will not hire anyone who joins the Columbia University community—whether as undergraduates or law students—beginning with the entering class of 2024,” the letter said.
The amusing thing about this is that the only people conceivably affected by the boycott are a handful of the most reactionary students on campus:
“Boycotts by employers of entire student bodies serve little purpose,” said Nikia Gray, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement. “Hiring decisions should be based on a candidate’s individual qualifications and conduct, not the institution named on their diploma.”
Federal judges “have wide latitude with respect to the hiring of law clerks,” said Jeremy Fogel, a former federal and state judge who now directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute at the University of California. But he questioned whether the letter was “consistent with the dignity of the judges’ office and the obligation of judges to be impartial.”
The “ban on law clerks from Columbia Law School likely punishes people who may have had no involvement in the campus protests,” Fogel said.
Nobody who doesn’t want something from them has ever called Ho or Branch a deep thinker.
The letter itself reflects a similar quality of thinking and good faith:
pic.twitter.com/eT7Jaguafs— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) May 6, 2024
Note graf #4, which asserts that if you think that violently attempting to stop the lawful transition of power is bad [which the authors of the letter plainly do not, at least if it is done on behalf of Donald Trump], then you must think it is equally bad when protesting students set up some tents on campus. Now all those punks will be denied the 5CA clerkships they definitely would have gotten otherwise. CHECKMATE LIBS!
Oh, and the last graf does the inevitable tu quoque, arguing that their boycott is justified because William Brennan did the same thing. This is needless to say completely false, but since I’m describing a letter signed by people like Matthew Kacsmaryk, I suppose the dishonesty goes without saying.