The differences are speech policy, public interest students, and faculty.Anonymous User wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:37 amOne of the things that’s confusing about this is that it seems to differ so drastically across schools. Are Chicago, CLS, and HLS really that different from NYU, SLS, and YLS? But I’ve either seen firsthand or gotten reliable reports from people I trust that abuse of students in Fed Soc is the norm at the latter three but not socially acceptable at the former three. Maybe part of it is selection, but before I applied to law school, as far as I remember CLS, HLS, and SLS did not have reputations on these issues one way or another (whereas Chicago was well-known for its zero-tolerance admin and NYU and YLS were well-known for intense student politics).
I’ve also heard Israel politics are very toxic at some schools, as we saw last year at NYU, whereas at my school they basically didn’t exist (on either side).
Chicago has a strong speech policy and a faculty that is supportive of the fedsoc chapter, which deters students from violating the policy.
HLS does a fair amount of outreach, has important faculty that are friendly to fedsoc, and Kagan, Minow, and John Manning all actively engaged with fedsoc. Students are pretty aware if they tried something like at Stanford, there would probably be repercussions.
NYU has a high number of public interest students who are not concerned about how law firms perceive their actions and many of these students receive full scholarships from the school. Might be stereotyping broadly from my time there, but a lot of them were raging anti-semites, which I suspect the fellowship office thinks is a benefit. Columbia recently began offering full scholarships to public interest students, which may result in an increase in such incidents on their campus, but their corporate culture may make it challenging to do so.
SLS and Yale are small schools with few FedSoc-friendly faculty members, with only McConnell and Amar being supportive of FedSoc at SLS and Yale, respectively. It's much easier to ostracize and intimidate opposing views of only 15-20 people. They too also have very public interest-oriented students and weak governance.