Alan Dershowitz to Newsmax: Stanford Dean 'Should Be Fired'

Harvard Law School professor and author Alan Dershowitz said Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion should be fired for disrupting a speech to students by a federal judge last week.

The dean, Tirien Steinbach, went viral in a video on social media after interrupting U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, who was invited by the Federalist Society to the school to give a talk on, "The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter."

After telling the judge that she respected freedom of speech and said students should stay to hear him, she allowed many to leave in protest of his allegedly "harmful" opinions and bench decisions.

"This is about free speech. This is about real diversity. What I want Stanford to do is appoint a new dean instead of the dean that was part of the problem here," Dershowitz said on Newsmax's "John Bachman Now" on Tuesday. "A new dean of diversity of opinion, free speech, and tolerance, and let that dean be the one who presides over speeches of this kind."

Dershowitz said that the incident "really makes me concerned for our for our legal system and the judicial system."

He said that despite being a lifelong Democrat, and very "anti-Trump as a person," he would likely be protested against at Harvard Law School, where he taught for 50 years, because he defended former President Donald Trump during one of his impeachment trials in the Senate.

"It's happening in all of America's best law schools, so it's not a problem limited to Stanford," Dershowitz said. "To his credit, the president of the university, who I know, has condemned what happened, and so has the dean of the law school. But now action has to be taken. The dean of diversity has to be fired. There has to be a new dean of diversity of opinion appointed."

Stanford Law School President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Dean Jenny Martinez wrote Duncan a letter March 11 apologizing for the incident and, while not specifically naming Steinbach, said the "staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so."

"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 said.

"We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to 'prevent the effective carrying out' of a 'public event' whether by heckling or other forms of interruption."

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