I'm going to pick apart a very narrow part of this Morning Shots because I think a lot of the right-wing (and even FIRE) takes on the have been maybe lacking context or understanding of just what respect the 5th Circuit (which this Judge is a member of) has in the broader legal community? I'm also going to ignore the students' heckling as it's outside the specific points I'm getting at, though I do acknowledge it's an important aspect of the situation there in total. For one, the 5th circuit has no respect amongst the broader legal community, outside of the few who take the position that one must respect all federal judges by virtue of their station as judges (a view I don't take, to be clear). It's a lawless circuit that regularly decides that it is unconstrained by Supreme Court precedent, whose judges on the bench often act more like Trump (and Republican) press spokespeople than actual impartial observers of the law. Would we expect people to treat Kash Patel with respect if a college invited him to talk just because he was the Principal Deputy of National Intelligence? I'm being a bit hyperbolic with the last point, but context absolutely matters. MAGAing from the bench erodes credibility. Would I want law students to not shout him down/heckle him such that he can't speak or would I want the administration to interrupt him? No. But we're treating this judge as if he has inherent credibility when he's established, repeatedly, that he has none. One more quick nitpick - "while some critics on the left have focused on Duncan's petulance, that's not really the key issue here, is it?" I think is completely wrong. First, if we're to afford him enhanced respect due to his station, we would expect him to act better than law students on campus, no? And wouldn't his failure to act better than the law students affect our relative weighing of his value as a speaker? And finally, this is a point I don't see brought up a ton, is the rest of the campus supposed to react politely and respectfully when the right-wing organizations on campus invite trolls to the podium who are just there to own the libs? Like, you look at his responses to questions (valid questions about his prior rulings!) and he was clearly not there to discuss his legal jurisprudence with any sort of criticism. You might say, then, that he was mad that Stanford didn't afford him a safe space to air his views without pushback. Again, while I appreciate and hope students act more respectfully in general, Duncan was clearly there to own the libs - do the libs have a responsibility to just sit there and take it because it's the libs responsibility alone to be polite?