A tense speaking engagement at Stanford Law School has resulted in the university issuing a formal apology to a federal appeals court judge.
Stuart Kyle Duncan, who has served as a judge on the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana since he was appointed by then-President Donald Trump in May 2018, found his appearance on the west coast met with a wild backlash.
The charge was predominantly led by the school’s LGBTQ+ community, who took issue with Duncan’s history of both arguing against gay rights initiatives during his law career before being seated on the bench and refusing to use a transgender litigant’s chosen pronouns while serving as a judge.
Duncan had been invited to speak by the Federalist Society chapter at Stanford for an event called “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation With the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.”
OutLaw, the Stanford campus’s LGBTQ consortium of students, interrupted Duncan’s planned remarks early on with loud protests, according to Reuters.
Duncan repeatedly called the group “idiots” in response.
Two days after the controversy-marred speaking engagement, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez issued a joint letter to Duncan.
“We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School. As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the letter read.
It also said that while student-led protests were welcome, disrupting the proceedings “whether by heckling or other forms of interruption” were violations of the school’s policy on free speech, and that “staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”
Duncan has not publicly commented since the issuance of the apology.
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