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October 12, 2002 [feather]
FIRE has launched a petition

FIRE has launched a petition to protest Washington University at St. Louis' Student Bar Association's refusal to recognize Law Students Pro-Life. Read it here, and sign it here.

You can also write to the dean of the WUSTL law school Joel Seligman to express your views on the unconstitutional bigotry of the SBA. He's been flooded with mail about this, though, so you'll probably get a form letter that resembles this in response:


Thank you for your recent email. The SBA and the ProLife students have been meeting and in the normal course of events, the ProLife student's application for recognition will be considered again and I suspect ultimately adopted. I have been far more impressed by the ProLife students here who have recently been constructive and worked to secure approval than I am in the wild posturing of FIRE. To be quite precise, all of us at this school of law also value democratic process. It would be thoroughly inappropriate for a dean to override or ignore the traditional autonomy of student organizations. I did, however, communicate to the Student Bar Association my personal view that this school should be based on mutual respect and pluralist principles.

Read more about WUSTL and the "wild posturing" of FIRE here and here. It's good to know that defending the First Amendment has become, in certain legal educational circles, synonymous with desperate insincerity. Such are the vagaries of politicized postmodern legal studies.

UPDATE: UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has more.

posted on October 12, 2002 9:00 AM