(Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
It really was only a year ago that law schools honored Lin Wood. For that matter, it was only 2019 when Clint Eastwood made a movie celebrating Wood (Sam Rockwell’s character was a composite of Wood and the rest of the Richard Jewell team). Now he’s facing Rule 11 sanctions in Detroit, got kicked off the Carter Page case in Delaware, and gotten permabanned from Twitter because of… this sort of stuff.
But that was then and this is now. Mercer Law School’s dean has joined other law school chiefs in denouncing the violent insurrection last week, but when the school posted this on the official Facebook page, students and alumni started pushing back hard on the fact that the school’s mock trial courtroom is still named after the professionally embattled attorney.
Thank you for joining this statement, but at the moment our school has a courtroom bearing the name of a man who played large part in stoking the fires of this attempted coup…. We have too many notable, worthy alumni to have his name on anything inside our school.
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You need to give Lin Wood his money back and disavow that absurd excuse for an alumnus.
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Rename the courtroom. Give the money back and do the right thing. It’s not worth it to be on the wrong side of history. You have the chance now to do the right thing.
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Seemingly small things matter. Words/gestures are important and powerful. Rename the courtroom.
And so on and so on.
Wood gifted the school $1 million to earn his name on the mock courtroom, but at this point the school has to wonder if a $1 million commitment is worth having your classroom named after a lawyer who just advocated for the assassination of the vice president on social media. Petitioners are reportedly being told that this goes above the dean’s pay grade and directed to deliver complaints to Mercer University’s president.
On the other hand, the school only dropped the “Walter F. George” name in 2018, an inveterate segregationist who led the pushback against Brown v. Board, so Mercer’s not known for swift action.
Law schools have confronted the uncomfortable alumnus problem a lot over the past year. An effort to strip Bill Barr of his honorary degree and rename a conference room named in his honor seems to have stalled at George Washington. And while Barr certainly deserves to lose every accolade he ever hustled in the first place, he pointedly did not spend the last few months feeding the election fraud delusion that exploded last week. So… congratulations on doing the bare minimum.
But it’s a serious issue for academic institutions. What happens when the people writing the checks dishonor themselves? Going forward, it’s basically malpractice for a university legal department not to include some sort of escape clause for the — in most cases, unlikely — event that a donor turns out to murder kittens on YouTube or something. Institutions can’t keep placing themselves in these awkward positions.
By the way, Chambers still has Wood listed as a Band 1 First Amendment lawyer? That might not be the right ranking for someone whose work a court just described as a “toxic stew of mendacity.” Just sayin’.
Yikes, It’s Not Even Been A Year Since Law Schools Were Honoring Lin Wood
Law School Faculty Wants To Strip Bill Barr Of Degree
Citing Lin Wood’s ‘Toxic Stew Of Mendacity,’ Delaware Judge Tosses Him Off Carter Page Suit
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.