When Stanford Law School students shut down a Federalist Society chapter event with a conservative federal appeals judge, aided by a diversity, equity and inclusion dean, and circulated a “headshots” poster identifying chapter board members, the school did not punish deplatformers and censored the event video so they couldn’t be identified.Though the law school suspended DEI dean Tirien Steinbach, who left months later, and the university pledged to add free speech and academic freedom to admissions, student orientation and staff training, the damage had been done: Federal appeals judges blacklisted Stanford Law students from clerkships and congressional Republicans targeted its accreditation.
Three years later, UCLA Law School is facing similar headaches for saber-rattling against its own Federalist Society chapter and members if they identify the students who repeatedly disrupted its April 21 event with Department of Homeland Security general counsel James Percival, while allegedly letting the latter freely identify the former for harassment.
Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Bayrex Martí asked chapter President Matthew Weinberg in an April 22 email whether the group was going to share the “full” recording, whose clips were already circulating online, “with those who RSVP’d or whose attendance was confirmed? I know it was described as an event limited to the UCLA Law community.”
In response to “requests online to identify students in the audience” from the video, Martí “would strongly encourage you and other organizers to not disclose those details,” given the “context” and “difficulty in fully anticipating how that information could be used in the future.”
If such information gets out, “and an implicated student reports behavior from anyone” that violates the student code of conduct, “the student organization and/or individual students could be connected to it (the allegation being that the outcome was reasonably predicted when the names were disclosed) and subjected to campus processes,” Martí wrote.
Fox News reported that Percival alleged hearing “death threats” against him at the event, but the DHS general counsel didn’t say that explicitly in comments it quoted from the Fox News Channel’s The Will Cain Show. “I might get death threats when I go on a college campus, but the people I work with at DHS get death threats just for showing up to work every day,” Percival said.
Attendees knew ‘their presence and behavior would be easily ascertained’
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Wednesday posted Martí’s email along with Reddit and Bluesky posts seeking to identify an attendee, using descriptions that appear to match Yitzchok Frankel, a plaintiff in the “Jew Exclusion Zone” lawsuit against UCLA that ended in a $6 million settlement, who is now a Los Angeles lawyer.
“Who’s the smarmy guy who looks like Moe Szyslak?” one user asked, referring to The Simpsons character. That person sued UCLA because of “the encampments in 2024,” another answered, referring to the so-called Jew Exclusion Zone.
UCLA Law third-year student James Womack posted a photo of Frankel at the event. “He’s an a–hole” who secured a settlement from UCLA “when they allowed pro-Palestinian protests on Campus” when Womack was a first-year student, Womack wrote. “He sucks.”
Frankel, who also testified at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Commission hearing on antisemitism, confirmed Womack and others were referring to him. “The worst part is where the guy says I’m in my early 40’s, when I’m actually in my mid-late 30’s,” he wrote on X.
The school threatened the chapter but showed “[n]o signs of concern” for protesters actually identifying chapter members, FIRE wrote on X. “This double standard is striking and sounds First Amendment alarms. […] Stop picking favorites, UCLA.”
The First Amendment protects students’ right to “share truthful information about a public event, including the names of students who disrupted it,” FIRE said. UCLA must state explicitly “no Fed Soc student member will face discipline for protected speech.”
