Yale Law dean signs petition to disbar Cruz and Hawley
In a rare joint statement Tuesday, 157 law school deans, including Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken, condemned the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and said the efforts by members of Congress “to disrupt the certification of a free and fair election was a betrayal of the core values that undergird our Constitution.”
The statement, by deans with “differing situations and views,” said those lawyers who challenged the election of President-elect Joe Biden “with claims that they did not support with facts or evidence. This betrayed the values of our profession.”
In addition, more than 10,000 law students and lawyers have signed a petition begun by seven Yale Law School students seeking to have Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz disbarred for their alleged parts in inciting the takeover of the U.S. Capitol last week.
Meanwhile, Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes was seen on video outside the Capitol building the day of the mob attack, PBS Frontline reported. Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers group in 2009, which PBS described as “a longstanding militia group that has pledged to ignite a civil war on behalf of Trump.”
Both instances have drawn national — if not international — attention, with the connections to Yale Law School noted.
The law school dean, in an email Tuesday, issued a statement saying, “It is exceedingly rare for deans to speak together on an issue that falls outside the ambit of legal education. It is rarer, still, to have such a remarkably diverse group of deans speak as one. That is a sign of how important these issues are to our profession and to the rule of law.”
Hawley is a 2006 graduate of Yale Law School. In a message to the law school community Tuesday, Gerken wrote, “It is not my role as dean to comment on individual proceedings against specific graduates, but I support efforts to hold accountable any lawyer — from any law school — who fails to uphold the duties of our profession. As a scholar who has spent her entire career studying democracy, I am appalled by any lawyer who attacks the legitimacy of a free and fair election without facts or evidence, who deliberately misleads the public about our democratic processes, or who disregards the risk or reality of violence.”
She added, “And as a professor who has cherished the opportunity to teach a generation of Yale Law graduates, I am deeply saddened whenever any graduate falls short of the high expectations of this profession or this Law School.”
The students’ petition, posted online Friday, says that the senators’ objections to the Electoral College vote that President-elect Joe Biden won, 306-232, was a rejection of the democratic will of the people and allegedly incited thousands to take over the U.S. Capitol. Five people died, including a woman involved in the break of the Capitol who was shot and a Capitol police officer who died of injuries suffered during the riot. A second Capitol police officer died of suicide afterward, according to the Washington Post and multiple other news outlets.
The petition has made international news, covered by the Washington Post, Newsweek and the Independent in Britain, among other media outlets.
The petition states: “In leading the efforts to undermine the peaceful transition of power after a free and fair election, Senators Hawley and Cruz attacked the foundations of our democracy. … In doing so, Senators Hawley and Cruz directly incited the January 6th insurrection, repeating dangerous and unsubstantiated statements regarding the election and abetting the lawless behavior of President Trump. … These actions prove Senators Hawley and Cruz fundamentally unfit for membership in the legal profession.”
Both senators have rejected the accusations, according to the Washington Post. Messages seeking comment were left with the offices of both senators.
“So much of the insurrection and so much of the justification by the participants was the false idea … that there had been voter fraud,” which President Donald Trump used to encourage his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, said Alex Boudreau, a third-year law student at Yale from Asheville, N.C., and one of those who started the petition.
Across the nation, local and state election officials and courts have found no credible evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.
In objecting to the electors’ votes from several states Biden narrowly won, Boudreau said, the senators were relying on “false myths of voter fraud” and so were allegedly violating the legal profession’s ethics rules.
The petition calls for the State Bar of Missouri to disbar Hawley, and for the State Bar of Texas to disbar Cruz, a Harvard Law School alumnus. It asks the District of Columbia Bar to disbar both Republican senators.
Cruz and Hawley continued to
object to states’ electoral votes even after the mob had overrun the Capitol, which Daniel Ki, a thirdyear Yale law student from Cupertino, Calif., called “beyond the pale.”
“It wasn’t the fact of the objection by itself that was the problem,” Ki said. “I think it was the combination of President Trump’s refusal to concede, his encouragement of people to come to the Capitol on Jan. 6, the baseless claims of voter fraud and the threat of violence.”
“That was one of the most egregious things about it,” Boudreau said. The attempt to overturn Biden’s election “when the election has been confirmed by so many courts and other government officials is itself quite bad,” Boudreau said. But Trump’s encouraging his followers to come to Washington “rises to a degree that is pretty unacceptable for a lawyer to be involved in,” he said.
“It was really the insurrection that made us decide” to create the petition, Boudreau said. “Like many people, we were horrified by what we saw and wanted to try to make a difference, to get some kind of accountability.”
The law students said it is the duty of every attorney to act as a “public citizen” for the good of all. “Lawyers have an obligation, for example, to avoid any misrepresentation or deceit,” Boudreau said. A photo of Hawley raising his fist to the crowd outside the Capitol “was pretty emblematic of the whole issue,” he said.
Ki added, “It shouldn’t be forgotten that five people at least have died as a result of violence at the Capitol.”
Boudreau said the students don’t think disbarment is the only action that should be taken against Cruz and Hawley. “I think it’s up to voters in Texas and Missouri, but we don’t think that they should be senators,” he said. “We think that they ought to resign as well.”
The students said the 10,000 signatures by law students and attorneys include 2,500 lawyers who are also members of the Missouri, Texas and Washington, D.C., bars. Ki said there have been a number of other signers who are not law students or lawyers, but they are only counting signers “who were legally trained” and understand the ethical issues involved.
Last week, Irina Manta, who was in Hawley’s Yale Law class, is a law professor at Hofstra University and founding director of the school’s Center for Intellectual Property Law, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today that accused Hawley of “eroding our democratic system” by his actions.
Hundreds of Yale Law alumni had signed an online petition criticizing Hawley’s actions prior to the certification vote and mob violence at the Capitol. Manta was among those who signed the petition.
Rhodes, a 2004 graduate of Yale Law School, was not seen entering the Capitol, PBS reported; attempts to reach him Monday were unsuccessful.
The PBS article goes on to say that eight men “clad in body armor” entered the Capitol and Oath Keepers were seen on video “dragging a wounded comrade out of the building. Members of the “group joined the protesters and insurrectionists flooding into the Capitol,” PBS reported.
The Southern Poverty Law Center describes Oath Keepers as an anti-government movement. “While it claims only to be defending the Constitution, the entire organization is based on a set of baseless conspiracy theories about the federal government working to destroy the liberties of Americans.” The SPLC quotes Rhodes in 2015 calling for John McCain to be tried and hanged for treason.
According to The Atlantic magazine, Rhodes had been a libertarian blogger after winning a prize at Yale Law School for a paper calling President George W. Bush’s enemycombatant doctrine unconstitutional.