On Wednesday, Stanford University said law student Nicholas Wallace could graduate after the university initially held his diploma while investigating a complaint over a satirical email mocking the Federalist Society.
Thu, Jun 3rd 2021 6:23am
Mike Masnick
Update: Perhaps due to all of the negative publicity this received, Stanford agreed to drop the investigation, and allow Wallace to go on with graduating. The original story remains below.
Ah, the Federalist Society. It makes a big deal about how cancel culture is supposedly a threat to liberty but apparently that doesn t apply when someone makes fun of
them. Nicholas Wallace is a 3rd year law student at Stanford Law, and a few weeks after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, Wallace decided to highlight that some prominent FedSoc members who were seen to have cheered on the riot at the Capitol. So he created an obviously satirical email mocking the Federalist Society and the types of events it normally holds and sent it to a Stanford Law listserv. In this case, Wallace made an invite for a fake FedSoc event, parodying standard FedSoc events, entitled: The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection and claimed that the main s
A student at Stanford Law School is set to graduate despite a serious threat made by the school over a satirical flyer produced that mocked Senator Josh Hawley and the Stanford Federalist Society. In what can best be called a curious misunderstanding of the First Amendment by what many had (previously?) thought to be one […]
E.J. Miranda, Stanford’s Senior Director of Media Relations.
A statement provided to Law&Crime notes:
A fundamental standard complaint was filed in the university’s Office of Community Standards against a student in the law school for an email that he had sent out on January 25. We followed our normal procedures and conducted a factual inquiry. Given that this complaint raised issues of protected speech, we also consulted with legal counsel after we obtained the relevant facts. In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent.
Bush made his challenge official Wednesday evening during an event at a downtown Austin bar. Former President Donald Trump said last week that he would issue an endorsement in the race "in the not-so-distant future."