Law schools are training lawyers who can’t take a punch

America’s law schools are failing to prepare students for the adversarial legal profession they’re about to enter, according to a scathing critique from a recent graduate who found her institution more interested in political affirmation than rigorous debate.

Alessandra Coote, writing in Washington Examiner, argues that the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law exemplifies a troubling national trend where progressive faculty avoid intellectual conflict and treat left-wing arguments as inherently correct while dismissing or discouraging conservative perspectives.

Drawing on her experience as a boxer at West Point, Coote expected law school to provide the intellectual equivalent of sparring in the ring—hours of drilling, testing ideas under pressure, and learning from mistakes. Instead, she encountered an environment that actively avoided intellectual conflict and taught students what to think about the law before teaching them how to think like lawyers.

Political Bias Replaces Legal Analysis

The progressive faculty bias created a chilling effect on conservative voices and deprived all students of the rigorous debate necessary to become capable lawyers, Coote contends. First-year professors routinely introduced Supreme Court opinions with right-and-wrong labels before students had even mastered the underlying legal doctrine.

In one particularly striking example, a Fourth Amendment class examining the plain view doctrine and limits of police search devolved into discussions centered on defendants’ race and socioeconomic status rather than whether officers could lawfully seize a machine gun plainly visible in a defendant’s living room. While those issues may deserve consideration, they did not answer the constitutional question at hand. Students spent more time debating the morality of the search than the legal doctrine governing it.

Creating Space for Intellectual Combat

Recognizing that the classroom failed to provide an arena for intellectual sparring, Coote served as president of her school’s Federalist Society chapter. Though associated with conservative and originalist legal thought, the organization’s stated mission is fostering open discussion about individual liberty, limited government, and separation of powers.

The chapter invited a federal court of appeals judge to speak to students on National Constitution Day as their first event, hoping to kick off a year of open debate. Then tragedy struck just 40 miles from campus when Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Coote learned of the shooting during a meeting for students considering joining the Federalist Society. When students walked out of the room, they found classmates cheering and high-fiving one another, celebrating Kirk’s assassination. The atmosphere changed overnight as political tribal lines hardened throughout the school.

Faculty Rhetoric Deepens Division

Rather than confronting this division, faculty rhetoric reinforced it. Professors spoke of the Federalist Society as though it represented a single ideology, reducing a diverse body of originalist, textualist, libertarian, and conservative thought to a simplistic caricature. After Kirk’s assassination, Coote felt she was arguing not against classmates but against assumptions embedded within the institution itself.

The school failed not just conservative students but all students by refusing to create an environment where ideas could properly compete, Coote argues. Graduates emerge ill-prepared to confront opposing theories in practice, making everyone worse lawyers regardless of political persuasion.

Unprepared for Legal Reality

Originalism and textualism now occupy a central place in American law. Whether students embrace or reject these theories, they must be prepared to understand and argue them in court. Lawyers who never confront the strongest version of opposing theories enter practice fundamentally unprepared for the adversarial system they’ve chosen to enter.

The polarization afflicting Utah’s law school reflects a broader national trend, but the institution created these problems through its hiring decisions. The faculty overwhelmingly leans left, and this makeup chills debate before students can even enter the classroom. Law schools should strive for intellectual diversity among faculty because students follow that leadership.

The legal profession is built on adversarial testing of ideas. Law schools that fail to prepare students for that reality do a disservice to the profession and to justice itself.

With information from Washington Examiner