Civil disobedience *can* get you dinged by the bar. Arrests/convictions get a lot of attention with character and fitness (and to let you know my priors: I think often *too* much attention). So their argument would be that even if this is civil disobedience, it should impact their admissibility.
I'd classify this as civil disobedience lite. What I mean by that is that they violated an institutional Stanford rule, not a *law*. Conduct violations can also get you into trouble for C&F, but seemingly moreso if they have to do with cheating/dishonesty/stuff like that. I think that whether or not you like their calculus, the students were aware of the relatively low stakes of shouting down a speaker on campus. Whether or not one thinks the stakes *should* be higher, I just don't see it as a useful metric of whether the students would repeat that in the higher-stakes, more obviously troubling, context of appearing before a judge in the courtroom.
They should investigate this stuff at the John Ruiz School of Law at Miami.
So here's my semi-responsive thoughts on that:
Civil disobedience *can* get you dinged by the bar. Arrests/convictions get a lot of attention with character and fitness (and to let you know my priors: I think often *too* much attention). So their argument would be that even if this is civil disobedience, it should impact their admissibility.
I'd classify this as civil disobedience lite. What I mean by that is that they violated an institutional Stanford rule, not a *law*. Conduct violations can also get you into trouble for C&F, but seemingly moreso if they have to do with cheating/dishonesty/stuff like that. I think that whether or not you like their calculus, the students were aware of the relatively low stakes of shouting down a speaker on campus. Whether or not one thinks the stakes *should* be higher, I just don't see it as a useful metric of whether the students would repeat that in the higher-stakes, more obviously troubling, context of appearing before a judge in the courtroom.