The Review

“I‘m not gonna argue with you. This is a party.” That was Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, remonstrating on Tuesday night with activists who had launched a protest at a backyard dinner that he and his wife, the Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, were hosting at their house for third-year law students. The protesters, led by Malak Afaneh of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, were themselves third-year law students; they had RSVP’d for the dinner, somehow sneaking in a microphone and amplifier.

As is the rule now, the incident was recorded on a phone camera. The video went viral. It shows Afaneh standing on a short set of steps linking the backyard to the house and beginning a speech while Chemerinsky repeatedly asks her to “please leave” and Fisk attempts to pull the mic from her hand. The dialogue between the protesters and the professors has the surreal quality so characteristic of these interactions, in which the impassioned formulas of militant protest rhetoric meet a resistance alternately impatient and puzzled.

“We are talking,” Afaneh says, “about Ramadan and the holy month of Ramadan as Muslim students. We refuse to break our fast on the blood of Palestinian people. The UC has committed sending $2 billion to weapons manufacturers.” Fisk responds: “I have nothing to do with what the UC does. This is my house.” When Chemerinsky tells another law student that “it is incredibly rude of you to abuse our hospitality in this way,” the student responds: “There is a genocide going on. You haven’t done anything about divestment.” Chemerinsky: “I don’t invest in anything.”

Afaneh insisted that her speech at Chemerinsky and Fisk’s home was protected by the First Amendment; she cited advice she said was given to her by the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing legal organization. In a statement, the organization affirmed its view that Afaneh’s speech was constitutionally protected. That view is unorthodox. Most lawyers would agree with Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who tweeted that “there’s no serious argument” for First Amendment protection in such a situation. And the University of California at Berkeley’s chancellor, Carol Christ, has offered Chemerinsky and Fisk support. “I am appalled and deeply disturbed,” she wrote in a statement, “by what occurred at Dean Chemerinsky’s home last night. While our support for Free Speech is unwavering, we cannot condone using a social occasion at a person’s private residence as a platform for protest.”

For their part, the student activists are characterizing the interaction as involving an act of violence, one with sweeping symbolic resonances. “Last night,” Law Students for Justice in Palestine wrote on Instagram, “Professor Catherine Fisk physically assaulted a Palestinian Law Student activist. ... This attack on a Palestinian Muslim law student is only the latest attack on Palestinian, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian students at the University of California, Berkeley.”

In a video posted to TikTok after the confrontation, Afaneh expatiated on what she characterized as Fisk’s assault. “She put her arms around me, grasped at my hijab, grabbed at my breasts inappropriately ... and threatened to call the cops on a gathering of Black and brown students.” In Afaneh’s view, Fisk “assaulted me because to her, a hijabi wearing, keffiyah repping Palestinian Muslim student that felt comfortable to speak in Arabic was enough of a threat to her that I was justified to be assaulted.”

Read the rest of my short profile of Erwin Chemerinsky, published last week in the Chronicle Review.

Recommended (special “Pans” edition)

• “The theories he so gleefully belittles were responding, many of them, to developments that we’ve become accustomed to but that must have been incredibly destabilizing.” In The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz is scathing on Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory.
• “After fact-checking many of the book’s claims and citations, I found a pattern: Most of the problems occur in sections of the book that try to prove that white rural Americans are especially likely to commit or express support for political violence.” Also in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper pokes some big holes in Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s White Rural Rage.
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Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin