Stanford's Catch-22

The battle over the Solomon Amendment that is designed to protect the access of students to the Reserve Officer Training Corps on campuses funded in part by the American taxpayer is getting quite a workout, we see from reading the Power Line blog. When the amendment was last in the news, law professors from around the country had flunked out completely in trying to get the Supreme Court to rule the Solomon Amendment unconstitutional. It denies schools federal funding if they deny ROTC the right to recruit on campus.

One would think that of all people, law professors, would have enough respect for the courts and the Constitution to accept the unanimous decision of the justices. But what is going on at Stanford Law School these days suggests otherwise. The sages of Palo Alto have decided that if they can't stop the recruiters from coming, they will try to stop the students from meeting with recruiters. The blog, Power Line, has followed Stanford's conduct closely in several recent posts, as Stanford plays the kinds of games that segregationists played to get around Brown v. Board of Education.

Now all students receive a letter from the office of career service signed by more than 40 faculty members that outlines Stanford's opposition the military's discrimination against gays and lesbians. Any student who nonetheless asks for an interview with a military recruiter will get a phone call or e-mail from the career service folks. The law school's dean, Larry Kramer, has a handy explanation for the law school's outreach to any prospective military officers. In an e-mail that has been posted on Power Line, Dean Kramer writes that the effort to contact students who have expressed an interest in JAG is to "ensure that their interest is real."

In other words, at Stanford the thought that a student would opt for a career defending the country, as opposed to a career spent suing it, is cause for incredulity. Dean Kramer told us that the same inquiry is made in any instance involving first-time employers or those that have little track record at recruiting at Stanford. In recent years, the military hasn't elicited more than five interviewees in any one year at Stanford Law, Mr. Kramer said. But this is a Catch-22 if there ever were one. Surely more students would meet military recruiters if they weren't harangued for doing so.

Dean Kramer also wrote in his email to Power Line that "we have had students on the left signing up with the intent of going just to hassle and fight with the interviewer, and students on the right signing up just so that recruiters could do school-sponsored on-campus interviews." Dean Kramer ought to have better things to worry about than students "on the left" going to the interviews to heckle the military. We have no doubt that a JAG recruiter would get the better of any argument a 2L wants to pick.

Notice that the faculty letter, which is sent from the career services office to all students, says: "we hope those of you who seek military service will arrange to meet military recruiters off campus." The Supreme Court's decision last year in Rumsfeld v. Fair said that the Solomon Amendment doesn't violate the First Amendment because law schools can continue to protest military recruitment, so long as the schools permit military recruiters from visiting.

But a policy of asking students to meet with recruiters off-campus may cross the line. It isn't a whole lot different from an illegal policy of asking recruiters to meet with students off campus. It seems to us that what Stanford Law School is a prima facie case of flouting the Solomon Amendment. So the test here is really of the Bush administration's mettle. It needs to assert the Pentagon's — and the taxpayers' — standing under the law lest it and the Supreme Court of the United States be made a mockery by professors who, in theory, are teaching law.