Author: Walter Olson

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Shouting Down Speakers—a Regular, Organized Campus Business

Last week a mob of chanting students prevented author Heather Mac Donald from speaking at Claremont McKenna College. After the students prevented entrance to the assembly hall, Mac Donald managed to give her talk by remote livestream for a while, until police cut her short out of concern for security; students had discovered her whereabouts […]

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Should We Be Able to Read Professors’ Emails?

Overlawyered Should we cheer or boo when outspoken professors at state universities become the target of public records demands filed by antagonists seeking their emails and correspondence? As we had occasion to note during the Douglas Laycock controversy in May and June, there’s plenty of inconsistency on this question on both left and right. Some […]

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Those Pesky Conservatives Just Aren’t Bright Enough

The law school at the University of Iowa, like so many departments at so many institutions of higher learning, has a faculty that is politically pretty much of one mind, with (as of 2007) 46 registered Democrats and only one registered Republican. When instructor Teresa Wagner applied for a professor’s post in her specialty, legal […]

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How the Law Schools Went Astray

This is an excerpt from Schools for Misrule, Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, to be published March 1 by Encounter Books. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is author of The Litigation Explosion and creator of the popular blog Overlawyered.com. *** In his 1918 book The Higher Education in America, the […]

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