"... Professor Dan Epps... hypothesized that Yale plans to make major changes to admissions in the wake of the expected Supreme Court affirmative action rulings, 'and they are doing this proactively'..."

"'... rather than dealing with any rankings implications later.' [Some] students [agreed and] speculated... that not having to worry about LSAT and GPA data dragging down its U.S. News rank will allow YLS to either (a) continue to use racial preferences in admissions or (b) water down its academic credentials. Furthermore... some sources suggested that Dean Gerken withdrew from the rankings because she feared that YLS was about to lose the #1 spot it has held for more than three decades—and she didn’t want that to happen on her watch.... One professor told me that... there was no sense within the faculty that YLS’s #1 ranking was at imminent risk. Instead... 'This is clearly part of a larger and deeper commitment on her part toward leadership in the law school industry when it comes to fairness, welfare, and equity.'"

From "Yale And Harvard Law To U.S. News: Drop Dead/Two leading law schools have withdrawn from the influential law school rankings; will others follow?" by David Lat (Substack).

I remember when U.S. News first started this ranking. It was 1987, and I was 3 years into teaching at the University of Wisconsin Law School. From day one, the professors at my school were hostile to the rankings. We had our values, and how dare U.S. News attempt to influence our choices. 

Here's how the rankings looked in 1987. We were #20 at that point — the point when the game began. A decade later we were struggling for position in the 30s and we currently stand at #43.

"After a year of high-profile scandals, Yale Law School is retiring an all-student listserv that became a breeding ground for progressive activism and online pile-ons..."

"If students want to 'debate important questions,' the dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken announced in an email on Wednesday, they can post on a physical bulletin board in the law school’s hallway. 'Debate and dialogue are the touchstones of an academic institution,' Gerken said. The new forum will force students to 'take time to reflect before posting, a habit that lawyers and members of a scholarly community must practice.'"

From "Yale Law School Axes Student Listserv That Energized Protests and Scandals/Ivy League law school will force students to write physical messages on a bulletin board after the listserv turned toxic" (Washington Free Beacon).

It's mind-boggling that Yale law students can't be left to their own devices writing on an email list. 

In the days before email, students and faculty would post their views on a bulletin board, nicknamed the "Wall," in the law school’s main hallway. That system, which Yale Law School is bringing back, "provided a healthy reminder that human beings are on the receiving end of the messages people send," Gerken said. "Indeed, sometimes students would run into the very people with whom they were debating and speak face-to-face."

Yale law students can't keep track of the humanity of the people on the receiving end of the email they write? What a concession! 

"And we all know that this is about payback for supporting Brett Kavanaugh, no more. If it brings the law school bad press..."

"... and ruins the already disappointing deanship of Heather Gerken — spoiler, it has — then that’s justice. Just read this, and imagine putting any of these people in charge of your life, your liberty, or your business’s future."

Glenn Reynolds weighs in on the Yale Law School controversy. This is the complicated Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld matter that I'm not taking any position on, because I don't trust the witnesses.

Meanwhile, at Lawyers, Guns & Money, Paul Campos is reviling Chua and Rubenfeld.

Campos quotes NY Magazine...

Three other professors [said] that Chua is the victim of overzealous zoomers who have confused the natural hierarchy of achievement — and Chua’s right to favor whomever she wants — with a social-justice outrage. “There are a lot of mediocre students at Yale who were superstars in their little county fairs, and now they’re in the Kentucky Derby and they’re not winning their races and they feel like it’s unfair because other students are doing better,” says one faculty member who thinks the dean, Heather Gerken, was too deferential to students in how she handled the small-group affair.

... and goes nuclear:

This person should be fired directly into the Sun. It’s basically impossible to get into YLS without perfect everything, and the analogy between running the Belmont in 2:24 and impressing a bunch of wankers on the YLS faculty with your talent for subtle ingratiation disguised as “brilliance” is, shall we say, not a super tight one.

It's easy for me to picture how the most elite admissions process could lead to a student body that, in action, feels like "a lot of mediocre students." But that's a dreadful dysfunction of the institution that the faculty is responsible for. It's truly contemptible to stand aloof and blame your students. 

And the use of the rural setting for the analogy — little county fairs — is out-and-proud snobbery of the most embarrassing kind. Little county fairs and the Kentucky Derby — that's rich. Is there horse racing at a county fair? I'd really like to know who came up with that dimwitted analogy, and I can see why it pissed Campos off. He's right that in that analogy, winning the Kentucky Derby is analogized to ingratiating yourself to law professors.

But what we don't really know is what kind of ingratiating was going on with the great power couple that was Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld? Was it something different — creepier and more sexual — than the ingratiating that goes on with other Yale lawprofs?

"I do think she was boxed in," said lawprof Heather Gerken about Sonia Sotomayor.

"Virtually any answer other than the answer she gave ends up evoking cries of judicial activism. The result, unfortunately, is that judges are portrayed as automatons or activists, when most are neither."

She was only boxed in by the limitations of her own intellect, expressive skill, and nerve. So explain to me why she belongs on the Supreme Court.