Top Law School Refuses To Fire Justice Clarence Thomas As Adjunct Professor

[IcyPeas]

A petition called the justice's employment at GW Law 'completely unacceptable.'

Because we steadfastly support the robust exchange of ideas and deliberation, and because debate is an essential part of our university’s academic and educational mission to train future leaders who are prepared to address the world’s most urgent problems, the university will neither terminate Justice Thomas’ employment nor cancel his class in response to his legal opinions.

Additionally, like all faculty members at our university, Justice Thomas has academic freedom and freedom of expression and inquiry. Our university’s academic freedom guidelines state: “The ideas of different faculty members and of various other members of the University community will often and quite naturally conflict. But it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals within or outside the University from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”

— An excerpt from an email sent by George Washington University Provost Christopher Bracey and law dean Dayna Bowen Matthew, in response to an online petition calling for Justice Clarence Thomas to be fired as an adjunct law professor in the wake of his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which called for the Supreme Court to “reconsider” rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships, and same-sex marriage. Justice Thomas will not be fired and his class will not be canceled.

https://abovethelaw.com/2022/06/top-law-school-refuses-to-fire-justice-clarence-thomas-as-adjunct-professor/

[Ocelot II]

1. Students shouldn't sign up for his classes.

Or if they do, they should challenge him constantly. I wouldn't dignify him by taking his class, though.

[at140]

3. If not many were signing up,

the school would automatically drop the course from curriculum.

[Paladin]

2. GW's decision to keep Thomas on staff ends its "Top Law School" status. (nt)

[jimfields33]

5. Who makes that determination?

[former9thward]

8. Various media groups look at student scores and other factors.

US News is widely looked at but there are others like Forbes. GWU Law School is usually somewhere in the top 30 (out of maybe 300 or so). Of course anonymous internet posters are free to do their own rankings.

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/law-rankings?name=George%20Washington%20University

[Sanity Claws]

4. He should be removed for his total lack of ethics.

Law schools should be enforcing ethics rules, not employing a Justice who is totally bereft of ethics.

[EndlessWire]

6. Yep. Well put. n/t

[EndlessWire]

7. Boy, are they missing the point.

Clarence is up there pontificating on rulings that haven't even happened yet. What debate? He isn't discussing a damned thing. He has an agenda, and it isn't for the benefit of all citizens.

If this attitude is what runs their university, then the students need to picket and boycott. Pretty soon, Thomas will be indicted for being a coup advocator. At least, let him be impeached. Think of all the bad publicity they will get. See how they spin that.

We all favor 1st Amendment rights. But, when you have a SCJ up there announcing his preferences to deprive millions of their civil rights, already decided without discussion, then you don't have equal rights. I don't know what is worse, lying to Congress to get your seat, or deciding in advance what your decision will be and broadcasting it in defiance of civil rights. Maybe having a wife who pushed for a coup.

I wouldn't spend a dime of tuition taking that prejudiced dumbass' class.

#impeachthomasnow

[LetMyPeopleVote]

9. The Five Worst Supreme Court Justices In American History, Ranked

In the legal community, Thomas is considered to be one of the worst SCOTUS justices in history

Link to tweet

https://thinkprogress.org/the-five-worst-supreme-court-justices-in-american-history-ranked-f725000b59e8/

5) Justice Clarence Thomas

Justice Clarence Thomas is the only current member of the Supreme Court who has explicitly embraced the reasoning of Lochner Era decisions striking down nationwide child labor laws and making similar attacks on federal power. Indeed, under the logic Thomas first laid out in a concurring opinion in United States v. Lopez, the federal minimum wage, overtime rules, anti-discrimination protections for workers, and even the national ban on whites-only lunch counters are all unconstitutional.

Though Thomas’s views are rare today, they have, sadly, not been the least bit uncommon during the Supreme Court’s history. He makes this list because, frankly, he should know better than his predecessors. As I explain in Injustices, many of the justices who resisted progressive legislation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were, like Field, motivated by ideology. Many others, however, were motivated by fear of the rapid changes state and federal lawmakers implemented in the wake of the even more rapid changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. It was possible to believe, in a world where factories, railroads, and the laws required to regulate factories and railroads were all very new things, that these laws would, as Herbert Hoover once said about the New Deal, “destroy the very foundations of our American system” by extending “government into our economic and social life.”

But Thomas has the benefit of eighty years of American history that Hoover had not witnessed when he warned of an overreaching government. In that time, the Supreme Court largely abandoned the values embraced by Justice Field, and the United States became the mightiest nation in the history of politics and the wealthiest nation in the history of money.