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Erwin Chemerinsky Gets Hoisted With His Own Petard; Do Not Pity Him

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Berkeley Dean of Law Erwin Chemerinsky invited his third-year law students to an annual dinner on the last night of Ramadan. Chemerinsky was unaware that the revolution would indeed be televised, and his home would be the de facto studio. My colleague Nick Arama gives the skinny.

There was a wild scene at the home of UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and his wife Professor Catherine Fisk on April 9. 
He had invited some third-year law students to dinner on three separate days in recognition of their achievements, which is a very nice gesture. He might regret doing so in the future because of what happened. April 9 was the first night of dinners. 
Even before the dinner happened, there were students spreading vile posters telling people to boycott the dinners and specifically attacking Chemerinsky, who is Jewish. The poster showed a picture of Chemerinsky holding a fork and knife covered in blood. 
“No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves,” it said. 
The dinner took place in their backyard. But the dinner started to go really south when a female 3rd year student Malak Afaneh stood up and wanted to speak about Ramadan and people she said were dying in Gaza. 

Arama’s article posted a longer video of the wild scene, but here is a snippet from an X post.

And KTVU did a news report and commentary by attorney Laura Powell.

According to other reports, the video only shows the end of the confrontative behavior. Afaneh and her friends were waging their protest ahead of the confrontation caught on video.

Another student who was present said she was not entirely surprised that something like this happened, considering that one of the tables had students she knew to be part of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine. She told J. that she felt bad for Chemerinsky and Fisk.
“They’re just such good people and kind people, and don’t deserve this,” she said.
The Instagram posts calling for a boycott of the event and depicting Chemerinsky included a caption that read, “This dinner is the prime example of a normalization PR event that hopes to distract students from Dean Chem’s complicity and support for the genocide of the Palestinian peoples.”
“I never thought I would see such blatant antisemitism,” Chemerinsky said in his statement, “with an image that invokes the horrible antisemitic trope of blood libel and that attacks me for no apparent reason other than I am Jewish.”
Chemerinsky lamented the disruption of what was meant to be a welcoming, positive evening.
“I am enormously sad that we have students who are so rude as to come into my home, in my backyard, and use this social occasion for their political agenda,” he said.

What is fascinating is that Chemerinsky plans to continue the remaining night of dinners but with enhanced security.

“The dinners will go forward on Wednesday and Thursday,” he wrote. “I hope that there will be no disruptions; my home is not a forum for free speech. But we will have security present. Any student who disrupts will be reported to student conduct and a violation of the student conduct code is reported to the Bar.”

Interesting. Apparently he still concludes he can reason with madness. Typical elite.

This is literally the chickens coming home to roost, as constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley noted. 

Regrettably, the scene that unfolded at the home of Dean Chemerinsky will be viewed by many as a triumph rather than an embarrassment for their cause. Disruption has become the touchstone of protests in higher education. At the same time, schools like UCLA have paid “activists-in-residence” or now bestow degrees in activism.
We now have a culture of disruption that has been consistently fostered by academics and administrators on our campuses. When asked “why the home of a dean?,” these students would likely shrug and answer “why not?”
In that sense, this is the ultimate example of the chickens literally coming home to roost. These students have been enabled for years into believing that such acts of disruption are commendable and that others must yield in the cancellation of events. For weeks, they demanded that these dinners be halted despite other students wanting to attend. In that sense, the appearance in an actual home is alarming, but hardly unexpected in our current environment.
For students such as Afaneh, it is just part of  “the privilege of being in spaces” to continue one’s activism.

Chemerinsky has turned a blind eye to this behavior when it involves attacks on free speech for conservatives and the right. He has spent his career in lawfare and maligning the Supreme Court—he has written books about it, particularly condemning the concept of constitutional originalism.

Chemerinsky is a bit more subtle, but his goal is the same—to impugn the bona fides of the current Supreme Court and to resurrect the concept, if not the vernacular, of “the living Constitution.” The book’s title, Worse Than Nothing, is a snarky rejoinder to Justice Antonin Scalia’s argument that originalism, while imperfect as a theory, is better than the left’s alternative—simply letting unelected justices impose their personal preferences on the entire country. Chemerinsky brazenly contends that subjective decision-making by judges—unfettered judicial discretion without pretense—is in fact superior to originalism. “Everything else is a distraction,” he concludes.

Turley said more on this in his assessment of the incident. 

Dean Chemerinsky can be criticized for fueling this rage by denouncing conservative justices as “partisan hacks” simply because he disagrees with their jurisprudential views. 

Turley also noted Berkeley, across the board, as well as other universities, has turned a blind eye when conservatives and libertarians have been attacked and deplatformed for their free speech stances.

Berkeley has lost cases in court over its failure to protect free speech.
Many faculty and deans remained quiet for years as conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters were cancelled on campus or deplatformed. It is only recently that some have become openly alarmed over the anti-free speech movement that they have fostered either directly or through their silence.

Chemerinsky has not only fostered this atmosphere, but remained unapologetic over his own skirting of law for his activism. Here is a video of Chemerinsky telling his law students that as Dean of a California law institution, he ignores California law that does not allow you to hire on the basis of race and, instead, uses sleight-of-hand and coded language to make choices on his appointments on the basis of skin color, rather than actual merit. He encouraged them not to articulate what they are actually doing, then threatened that if these statements he made ever leaked, he would deny them.  

Chemerinsky was also behind the lawsuit to try and overturn the will of the people by deeming the 2021 Gavin Newsom Recall unconstitutional. So, when free speech, constitutional muster, and the will of the people work against judicial activism, Chemerinsky has serious problems with it. Otherwise, carry on!

This man does not deserve any pity; this is the natural progression of the atmosphere he has fostered. He just doesn’t get that he is now a target. He will.

 

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