Whelan falsely suggests that Kagan was alone in restricting military recruiters access to career services office

Is Ed Whelan's Google still broken?

Last year, my colleague Sarah Pavlus noted that Ed Whelan speculated that there may be "Political Corruption" at the Congressional Research Service because it issued a report on selected opinions by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Concluding his post, Whelan asked: “Has CRS ever before prepared an assessment of the record of a Supreme Court nominee?” A simple Google search would have answered the question for him. Even after Whelan updated his post to acknowledge that CRS had issued a report on Alito, Whelan suggested that CRS might not have issued reports prior to its reports on Alito and Sotomayor. Again, a simple Google search would have revealed that CRS did a report on Clarence Thomas as well.

Whelan appears not to have improved his Googling skills in the past year. Discussing a Washington Post article that we have also posted on, Whelan states:

The article reveals that Kagan may have been the only law school dean who used the Third Circuit's ruling as an excuse to discriminate against military recruiters (for background, see my point 2 here):

Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield, who founded the law school coalition, which ultimately lost its case at the Supreme Court, said he thinks that Harvard was the only school that stopped welcoming recruiters right after the 3rd Circuit ruling, although no one kept complete track.

Following a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that a law requiring schools to give military recruiters equal access to campuses Kagan briefly applied Harvard's anti-discrimination to military recruiters. For one semester in 2005, Kagan barred Harvard Law School's Office of Career Services (OCS) from working with military recruiters due to the military's discriminatory “Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.” Nevertheless -- as the Post makes clear -- military recruiters continued to have access to Harvard students during that semester. During the rest of her deanship, Kagan made an exception to Harvard's anti-discrimination policy and allowed OCS to work with military recruiter.

Contrary to Whelan's suggestion that no other law schools restricted military recruiters, according to 2005 articles in the Yale Daily News and The New York Times, after the Third Circuit ruling, Yale Law School also refused to allow military recruiters to avail themselves of the facilities of its career office. In addition, according to the Yale Daily News, New York Law School, Vermont Law School, and William Mitchell College of Law also took actions similar to Harvard following the 3rd Circuit ruling.

Furthermore, the Joint Appendix filed in connection with the appeal of FAIR v. Rumsfeld to the Supreme Court contains statements from numerous law professors detailing their law schools' attempts to restrict military recruiters' access to career services offices.