Don’t give money to law schools unless they teach originalism, conservative federal appeals judge says

1. Home
2. Daily News
3. Don’t give money to law schools unless they…

Law Schools

Don’t give money to law schools unless they teach originalism, conservative federal appeals judge says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

October 29, 2024, 12:17 pm CDT

“Anti-originalist” law professors dominate law schools, and they aren’t equipping students with the practical knowledge that they need to make originalist arguments, a conservative federal appeals judge said last week in a lecture hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Judge Amul Thapar of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Cincinnati said conservatives could spur change by withholding donations to the schools, report Bloomberg Law, Law360 and Reuters via the Originalism Blog. How Appealing links to the video.

Taxpayers can also play a role by demanding that publicly funded law schools stop “pursuing their own political agendas,” Thapar said, according to Reuters.

Bloomberg Law and Law360 highlighted this remark: “Make no mistake: Money talks. Only when the taxpayers and donors alike demand it will law schools start to change.”

Originalist judges interpret the Constitution based on its meaning as understood at the time it was written. Thapar, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was on Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court short list.

Thapar said law professors at too many law schools tell their students that a court’s originalist analysis “is just a smokescreen for some nefarious political goal.”

The lack of training, Thapar said, means that lawyers are missing originalist arguments that could benefit their clients, according to Bloomberg Law and Law360.

“It’s amazing how many times my colleagues and I say, ‘If they only would have made argument X, their client might have had a chance,’” Thapar said.