A quick word on the speech controversy at Lewis & Clark

A quick thought on the students at Lewis & Clark Law School protesting Christina Sommers earlier this week. I confess to knowing nothing about Sommers or why she generated such anger from the students. I was surprised by the heat the event generated--the discussion on the ConLawProf listserv became quite stark. People may have been a bit surprised to see this happening at a law school (recall Heather Gerken's argument last summer that the nature of legal education affects how students go about protesting). There was some discussion of whether the protesters' actions warranted school code-of-conduct charges, which must be reported to the Bar and can create longer-term professional headaches than they would for undergrads.

Having watched the several videos, it appears there were two groups of protesters, inside and outside the room and the building. So this case illustrates the vision of counter-speech and heckling I have been trying to formulate. The latter group was engaged in protected activity. Although they made noise and made it more difficult for Sommers to be heard, they were not interfering with her use of a reserved space in which one speaker had priority right. It appears they were in an otherwise public outdoor space (although I do not know the details or rules about spaces at L&C); if so, their speech in that space should receive equal footing with Sommers' speech in the classroom.