Why Judges Are Boycotting Law Clerks From Columbia
The reputational costs from our boycott ought to provoke some soul-searching at the school.
May 8, 2024 The Wall Street Journal
I joined a dozen of my colleagues on the federal bench this week in signing a letter stating that we won’t hire law clerks who matriculate at Columbia University beginning this fall. We have received criticism for our choice to punish an institution rather than target the individuals responsible for miring it in anti-American and antisemitic radicalism. I want to explain that choice.
The purpose of any boycott is to change the behavior of the target. To be effective, a boycott must rally a critical mass of the target’s customers. Hardly anyone thinks Columbia’s behavior is acceptable. The only question is whether we are being so overinclusive that we will punish the wrong people. I had this concern but ultimately decided that it is a criticism of boycotts per se, not of this particular one.
Boycotts naturally have wide-ranging effects. Those advocating boycotts of Israel know they will hurt not only the country’s hawks and elites but poor and working-class Arabs, black Israelis, dissidents, peace activists—you name it. Boycotts are naturally limited. The anti-Israel boycotters know they aren’t targeting all regimes they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as unjust. Yet they proceed anyway because they have a goal in mind. Everyone who decides to boycott has to decide how legitimate the goal is and how important it is to achieve.
We think it’s important to force Columbia and its peer institutions to change. Our boycott is prospective only, which means everyone is on notice. High-school guidance counselors should warn students who want to enroll at Columbia that they would likely be closing some doors for themselves. Law-school applicants should be smart enough to figure out that while some schools place many alumni in clerkships, others have the opposite reputation. Our boycott may make a difference in those considerations only on the margins, but other judges may be moved to join us. I hope the reputational costs of being shunned by federal judges will give Columbia’s leaders reason to search their souls and change course before the boycott even begins. I signed the letter not to inflict punishment on students but to send a clear message to Columbia that its approach to campus antisemitism and anti-Americanism is unacceptable.
If federal judges found out there was a school tolerating or fostering a hostile and threatening environment for black students, all of us would boycott that school. We would do so because that’s the tool available to us to enforce the basic norms of decency that undergird our constitutional system. In the process, we’d probably hurt the careers of a righteous majority of students at that school. But no one would lose sleep over that—it would be a small price to pay to do the right thing. Why are we now expected to sit idly by instead of doing what we can when a school has revealed the extent of its corruption?
Our position is no different in spirit from the remedy available under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the Congressional Research Service summarizes this way: “Agencies also have at their disposal a uniquely powerful tool: the termination or refusal to provide federal financial support to an institution.” Would such a funding termination, even in a proper case, punish professors and students who aren’t part of the problem? Yes. Does that undermine, in some moral sense, the goal of inducing compliance and change? No.
Every elite university asks employers to make collective judgments about their alumni. Graduates of Columbia have been viewed as among the most capable young people in the country. Recent events have made clear that Columbia deserves a very different reputation.
I don’t begrudge judges who choose not to join us in this effort, but I continue to believe that we who have chosen to boycott are justified in using the tools at our disposal—prestigious clerkship slots—as a force for good.
Judge Solomson serves on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.\
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Appeared in the May 9, 2024, print edition as 'Why I Won’t Hire Law Clerks From Columbia'.