Law Schools Are Using Security Concerns to Silence Speech

Opinion|I Resigned as Manhattan’s U.S. Attorney. Law Schools Are Missing the Point of My Story.

Since I resigned from my job as interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in February, I have accepted several invitations from law schools to speak to students about public service. Students and administrators have seemed receptive to my message that the rule of law and our democracy rest on core principles, including civil disagreement and the pursuit of justice without fear or favor. I believe in those principles, which is why I resigned when I was unable to air objections to the dismissal of corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City for reasons I considered improper.

But lately I’ve been worried that while law school leaders are eager for me to lecture their students on the value of these ideals, they may be missing a key point: that these principles must be defended even when doing so is inconvenient or costly.

Universities, no less than the professionals they teach, have an obligation to uphold civil dialogue as the bedrock of a functioning democracy. Administrators continue to overlook that this obligation means they must guarantee forums to explore a diversity of ideas safely and openly.

A recent episode at New York University School of Law illustrates the problem. Administrators forced N.Y.U.’s Federalist Society chapter, a conservative student group, to cancel an on-campus event scheduled for this past Tuesday, Oct. 7, with my Manhattan Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar whose recent book criticizes the illiberal takeover of legal education and the rise of antisemitism on many university campuses. The school’s reasons for denying event approval were a moving target, but when students questioned why the event was not viable on the chosen date, the school cited security reasons. After The Free Beacon reported on the cancellation and free-speech groups criticized N.Y.U., the law school reversed course and came up with the resources to host the event safely.

This was not an isolated incident. For years, conservative speakers on campuses — from DePaul University to the University of California, Berkeley, to Dartmouth College — have had their events denied forums, shut down or derailed by security threats or anticipated backlashes that ostensibly posed safety concerns.

Such incidents are a capitulation to extremists who use intimidation to censor speech and silence dissent rather than persuade through debate. In the case of Mr. Shapiro’s appearance, the law school said it merely asked students to find another date for the event. The school has claimed that this request had nothing to do with the content of the proposed program or the political views of the speaker, but there is an absurdity to the denial.

Students who object to policies of the Trump administration or oppose Israel’s war in Gaza or who advocate abortion rights rarely have to worry that their campus speakers will be disrupted by protesters or generate security concerns related to the backlash of a student mob. Security concerns, real or fabricated, arise when a speaker promises to buck campus orthodoxy. And that is precisely when universities need to stand up for debate rather than surrender to those who would stifle it.

The problem has taken on even more urgency with the killing of Charlie Kirk last month at Utah Valley University. Rising concerns about political violence are a tempting excuse to avoid hosting speakers who might ignite controversy or opposition. Instead, Mr. Kirk’s assassination should spur universities to do their part to protect and cultivate the free and safe exchange of ideas.

In practice, that means that no students, including those presenting minority viewpoints, should be told that their ability to gather and discuss ideas will be contingent on a university’s willingness to keep them safe. Ensuring the safety of students and speakers should be an ironclad commitment. If there are security concerns, schools should proudly pay for as much security as is necessary, as defenders of civil dialogue and liberal education. Canceling events is proof of concept for student troublemakers. It further incentivizes those who threaten to silence their opponents by proving that such methods work. Mr. Shapiro is a case in point. In 2022 student protesters prevented him from participating in an event at a law school in San Francisco by shouting over him any time he tried to speak. Canceling his latest event would have achieved the same result of suppressing his speech, in the form of a prior restraint.

To break the cycle of censorship, students should be warned: If you disrupt this event in a manner that censors speech, we will identify you and impose severe consequences. If a student organization engineers such a disturbance, the group’s leadership will face the same fate. When robust security is paired with meaningful consequences for those who violate campus policies, threats of disruption and violence will lose their force as a weapon to monopolize campus speech. In the long run, that is the right investment to ensure that Mr. Kirk’s killer and those who use less lethal forms of intimidation do not have the last word.

There is a sad irony that the N.Y.U. law school’s initial instinct was that the event’s date — the second anniversary of the Hamas-led barbaric attack against Israeli civilians — was a reason not to host it, rather than to ensure that it moved forward. If there was ever a day to help students gather safely and hear from a speaker who has criticized antisemitism on campus, it was this one.

Bad publicity seems to have prompted N.Y.U. to do the right thing, but it also exposed that universities are capable of surmounting security concerns when they have the will to do so.

Danielle Sassoon is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and previously served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

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