Yale Law

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AI Overview

The "Yale Law Republicans" do not have a dedicated, institutional donor funder. Instead, conservative presence and organizing at Yale Law School primarily receive backing through university-recognized student groups, alumni networks, and broad-based conservative organizations with ties to the law school. [1]

Key conservative entities at the school and their associated funders include:

The Federalist Society: The prominent conservative and libertarian law student organization (founded at Yale) relies on large, national conservative foundations. Its network is heavily bankrolled by groups like the Searle Freedom Trust, the Scaife Foundation, and DonorsTrust, as well as the dark money network overseen by conservative activist Leonard Leo. , [2, 3]

Institutional Portraits & Specific Initiatives: Major conservative initiatives at the law school have been funded by specific high-profile Republican megadonors. For example, Texas billionaire Harlan Crow provided a $105,000 donation in 2018 to commission and install the official portrait of Justice Clarence Thomas in the law school. [1]

For more than two decades, Yale Law School has also served as a focal point for the broader political ecosystem, helping to foster high-profile conservative leaders and their financiers in Silicon Valley and beyond. [1, 2]

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REF

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/07/16/jd-vance-and-peter-thiel-what-to-know-about-the-relationship-between-trumps-vp-pick-and-the-billionaire/

JD Vance And Peter Thiel: What To Know About The Relationship Between Trump’s VP Pick And The Billionaire

ByAntonio Pequeño IV,

Forbes Staff.

Pequeño is a breaking news reporter who covers tech and more.

Jul 16, 2024,

Topline

JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, has had a long, collaborative relationship with GOP donor and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, one that has aided Vance from his time in venture capital to his role as an Ohio senator.

Key Facts

Vance and Thiel’s relationship dates back to 2011, when the senator met Thiel following a talk the venture capitalist gave at Yale Law School that Vance has characterized as “the most significant moment of my time” at the institution, according to a blog post he wrote for Catholic magazine The Lamp.

Vance began planning for a career pivot outside of law following the talk, noting Thiel was “possibly the smartest person” he ever met and that Thiel’s Christian faith “defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists,” according to the post.

Thiel later became a “pretty good mentor” to Vance, according to The Washington Post, with Vance making the switch to venture capital and joining the Thiel-co-founded Mithril Capital in 2015 as a partner, according to Politico.

Vance published “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” in 2016 while still working for Mithril Capital, thrusting the venture capitalist into the limelight as he began pondering a potential run for office in the future, according to the Post.

Vance left Mithril Capital in 2017 and joined Washington D.C.-based investment firm Revolution as a managing director to invest in startups outside of major hubs like Silicon Valley and New York City.

Vance launched his own venture capital firm in 2019 under the name Narya Capital, which sought to invest in startups in overlooked cities and reportedly received backing from Thiel and other billionaire investors like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Axios reported.

Thiel also reportedly brought Vance, who had established himself as a critic of Trump, to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to smooth over his relationship with the former president, according to The New York Times.

Following the meeting, Vance became more sympathetic to Trump and his policies, downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and securing an endorsement from the former president in his 2022 Senate run just weeks before Election Day.

Vance garnered more support from Thiel during his successful Senate run in 2022, receiving record-breaking donations of about $15 million from Thiel, which marked the largest amount of money donated to a single Senate candidate ever.

Most of Vance’s campaign advertising was outsourced to the Protect Ohio Values super PAC that Thiel donated to, Politico reported, noting Thiel helped recruit about 10 major donors for Vance including venture capitalist David Sacks, who donated $1 million.

Forbes Valuation

We estimate Peter Thiel’s net worth at $7.9 billion—largely thanks to his role as one of Facebook’s earliest investors, as well as his work as a general partner of venture capital firm Founders Fund, which is a key investor in Stripe and SpaceX. Thiel has also invested millions into Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition software firm.

Tangent

Thiel’s backing appeared to be a massive difference-maker for Vance’s 2022 Senate run, as the then-candidate lacked a funding edge over his fellow candidates and had made a litany of anti-Trump comments years before, calling the former president “reprehensible,” “cynical” and privately suggested he could be “America’s Hitler.” Vance walked back his comments in the leadup to Election Day and managed to secure an endorsement from Trump, who later said Vance “gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.”

Crucial Quote

Thiel said during an interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month, “You hold a gun to my head, I’ll vote for Trump.” The comment seemingly showed reluctant support for Trump, as Thiel said if he was asked to make a pro-Trump argument, he would not, though he could “probably come up with anti-Biden arguments.” Thiel also noted he would not donate money to Trump and that he believes the former president will win in November. Thiel donated more than $1 million to Trump in 2016.

What Is Peter Thiel’s Connection To Donald Trump?

:{Thiel was one of Trump’s most significant donors in 2016 and has expressed a sort of reluctant support for the former president, backing congressional candidates who have echoed Trump-sourced conspiracy theories and later withdrawing further financial support for Trump.

Thiel told The Atlantic last year there were a lot of things he “got wrong” with his support for the former president in 2016. Thiel’s political ideology rests in disbelief of establishment institutions and criticism of progressive elites. He also has pushed for more restrictions at the border. Meanwhile, Vance has more closely aligned his politics with Trump’s, opposing nationally guaranteed abortion rights, pushing against strict gun laws and prioritizing the fight against inflation. However, Trump and Vance do not see eye to eye on everything, including their levels of public support for Project 2025.}:

Key Background

:{Thiel, who is also a co-founder of the CIA-backed analytics firm Palantir, has given millions of dollars in donations largely to Republican lawmakers and political action committees since 2010, occasionally donating to Democrats such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., according to campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.

Thiel has donated $20 million to the Saving Arizona PAC, which supported venture capitalist Blake Masters during a failed Republican Senate run in 2022. Masters is now running as an Arizona congressional candidate. Thiel has also donated thousands of dollars to Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.}:

Public tax records from 2015 to 2020 showed that large conservative donors offer most of the financial backing for Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit organization bringing forward the two lawsuits that could end race-conscious college admissions. The documents also reveal that the organization spent more than $8 million over this time period.

By Anika Arora Seth | , November 2, 2022

Staff Reporter

Students For Fair Admissions, the anti-affirmative action group challenging race-conscious admissions in the Supreme Court, is largely funded by conservative trusts — including organizations with financial ties to the Federalist Society, a legal network founded at Yale that is linked to six of the nine sitting SCOTUS justices.

These six form the Court’s conservative majority, and legal scholars expect that they will be instrumental in upcoming votes that will likely overturn affirmative action — putting a stop to race-conscious college admissions.

According to public Internal Revenue Service filings, SFFA raised more than $8.5 million between 2015 and 2020, with around $8.2 million in expenses over the same time period. In 2019, conservative foundations DonorsTrust, Searle Freedom Trust and the Sarah Scaife Foundation donated $1 million of the over $1.5 million SFFA raised that year — almost two-thirds of their annual revenue.

These foundations are donor-advised funds, which are not legally required to disclose the identities of its donors, most of whom choose anonymity. The use of anonymous donations is not a partisan tactic — Democrats and Republicans alike have leveraged dark money, which refers to funds routed through loosely regulated nonprofits, to finance campaigns.

“I would say the Searle and Scaife Foundations … fund a wide variety of conservative causes,” Federalist Society co-founder and co-chair Steven Calabresi ’80 LAW ’83 told the News. “They’re the equivalent — though far less wealthy — of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. They do similar things, they fund some speakers and organizations — it’s not uncommon.”

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On Oct. 31, SFFA brought two lawsuits to the Supreme Court: one against Harvard that alleges discrimination against Asian American applications, and one against the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill that alleges discrimination against Asian American and white applicants.

Founder and president of SFFA Edward Blum told The New York Times earlier this month the group had received more than 5,000 individual monetary contributions. But The Harvard Crimson reported that public filings show a handful of conservative foundations — including DonorsTrust, the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the 85 Fund — donate the vast majority of SFFA’s capital.

All four of these organizations hold ties to the Federalist Society, a network of primarily libertarian and conservative lawyers. In 1982, Calabresi co-founded the group at Yale alongside students at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. Now, six of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices — Samuel Alito LAW ’75, Clarence Thomas LAW ’74, Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90, John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — are current or former members of the society.

Calabresi is also a visiting professor of law at Yale.

What are these funds?

The Searle Freedom Trust donated $500,000 to SFFA annually from 2017 to 2019, and the Scaife Foundation contributed $250,000 of SFFA’s approximately $1.5 million total donor revenue in 2019. The Scaife Foundation is also reported to fund the Federalist Society.

According to The Harvard Crimson, DonorsTrust contributed $2.5 million to SFFA between 2017 and 2019. Their largest contribution was $1.5 million in 2018 — and it made up more than half of SFFA’s funding for the year.

In January of 2021, CNBC reported that DonorsTrust gave millions of dollars to conservative organizations in 2019 that later went on to push false claims of election fraud after the 2020 election. Other recipients of DonorsTrust funding include the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association’s Freedom Action Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society itself.

An analysis by the Columbia Journalism Review showed that Charles Koch and David Koch were the top contributors to DonorsTrust in 2011, and the brothers donated millions in the 2010s. Though David Koch died in 2019, the Koch brothers are known for their role in Koch Industries — the second-largest private company in the United States — and their work funneling libertarian and conservative donor revenue into television and other forms of multimedia advertising.

In a statement to the News, DonorsTrust CEO and president Lawson Bader said the organization does not comment on their donors’ identities.

“We do not comment on — nor disclose — specific contributions to DonorsTrust as we expect (and the burden falls on) the donor to disclose such gifts according to applicable IRS requirements and public filings,” Bader wrote.

Anonymous trusts like these are often closely linked among themselves. DonorsTrust is a core funder for the 85 Fund, another organization behind SFFA’s financing. The 85 Fund, a legal alias for the Judicial Education Project and the Honest Elections Project, was founded by Leonard Leo, who presently co-chairs the Federalist Society with Calabresi. In 2018, more than 99 percent of The 85 Fund’s capital came from a single donation from DonorsTrust. In 2020, DonorsTrust contributed $20 million.

“We can confirm that in 2018 DonorsTrust donor-advisors recommended $6.96 million to Judicial Education Project for general operations,” DonorsTrust President and CEO Lawson Bader wrote in a statement to the News. “We do not know how JEP allocated those funds.”

The 85 Fund, or JEP, is an extensive network of Leo-advised organizations that influence conservative policy and judicial nominees, CNBC reports. When former President Donald Trump appointed current justices Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90 and Neil Gorsuch to the Court, Leo was a key outside advisor. Per Axios, Leo began The 85 Fund — and fleshed out his broader funding network — to counter growing influence by the left’s own dark money web, Arabella Advisors.

In 2020, SFFA received a $250,000 donation in 2020 from The 85 Fund, The Harvard Crimson reported.

In January of 2020, Leo left his former position as Federalist Society executive vice president to start a conservative consulting firm called CRC Advisors, which has developed a history of lobbying against climate change mitigation policies. He remained co-chair of the Federalist Society's board of directors.

Calabresi told the News that Leo privately advised people in the presidential administration but did not discuss or clear judicial recommendations — or any other private governmental matters — with Calabresi, the Society or any Board members.

“There was a lot written about the Federalist Society being involved in picking judges,” Calabresi told the News. “What happened there is that the first White House Counsel … hired Federalist Society members to work as government employees making recommendations, not Society members. These were personal recommendations, not Federalist Society recommendations.”

Between 2014 and 2017, as Leo advised Trump on these judicial picks, The Washington Post reports that he was working with allies to raise more than $250 million in anonymous donations. These funds were partially used to support conservative policies and judicial appointments — including, per NPR, commercials for Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The 85 Fund, Searle Freedom Trust and Sarah Scaife Foundation did not respond to requests for comment to this story.

Where does SFFA fit in?

In her statement to The Harvard Crimson, DonorsTrust spokesperson Carolyn Bolton confirmed that the fund donated $2.5 million to Students for Fair Admissions from 2017 to 2019.

“The sum granted out to Students for Fair Admissions during that three-year time frame reflects our commitment to honoring donor intent and helping our givers support charities that align with their diverse interests,” Bolton wrote in a statement. “DonorsTrust is not involved in how Students for Fair Admissions operates or how it achieves its organizational mission.”

Calabresi said that foundations can give money to a wide variety of different organizations, noting specifically that the Federalist Society has a policy of not engaging in litigation.

“The Federalist Society acts like an umbrella, including libertarians, classical liberals, conservatives and moderate liberals who just enjoy coming to debates,” Calabresi said. “We were afraid that a litigation center would drive people away, and we wanted to keep the debates alive.”

He added that the Society has never taken a position on litigation or pending legislation, calling this a differentiation from the more left-leaning American Bar Association as it rates judicial nominees. Calabresi further noted that he has not been involved with fundraising for the Society. Instead, Calabresi’s responsibilities have centered around organizing symposiums, debates, speaker events and conventions.

Conservative legal entrepreneur Edward Blum founded SFFA in 2014 with the goal of tearing down affirmative action. According to the group’s website, SFFA is a nonprofit membership group that now includes over 20,000 people who consider race-related college admissions policies to be “unfair, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.”

Blum did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In an SFFA press release sent to the News about the Oct. 31 hearings, Blum described his moral opposition to race-based affirmative action.

“It is a moral failure that our most competitive universities place high schoolers on racial registers and tell the world that their skin color affects what they think and know, and what they like and do not like,” Blum wrote in the statement.

ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer tool offers summary data for nonprofit tax returns as well as more detailed documents from the IRS. The IRS has provided extracted financial data for SFFA’s 2020 filing but has not yet released the more-detailed source documents.

The Nonprofit Explorer reveals that since 2016, SFFA has paid Blum $48,000 annually. Other individuals listed as key employees include Treasurer Richard Fisher, Secretary Abigail Fisher, Director Alex Chen, Director Joe Zhou and Director Hua Eva Guo, who is newly listed as of 2019. In every year but one, all the other employees received $0; in 2019, Richard Fisher was reportedly paid $3,150.

Abigail Fisher, her father Richard Fisher and Blum initially co-founded SFFA to raise questions about whether Abigail — a white student — was fairly denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin.

The 2013 case marked Blum’s first time challenging affirmative action before the Supreme Court. Blum claimed that affirmative action disadvantaged white applicants, citing Abigail Fisher as an example of a white applicant who was discriminated against and denied admission. In 2016, the Court ruled 4-3 that Fisher was not discriminated against and allowed race-conscious admissions to stand.

Now, decisions on the two affirmative action cases currently before the Supreme Court are expected by the spring of 2023.

ANIKA ARORA SETH

Anika Arora Seth was the 146th Editor in Chief and President of the Yale Daily News from April 2023 until May 2024. Previously, Anika covered STEM at Yale as well as admissions, alumni and financial aid. She also laid out the weekly print edition of the News as a Production & Design editor and was one of the inaugural Diversity, Equity & Inclusion co-chairs. Anika is pursuing a double major in statistics & data science and women's, gender & sexuality studies.

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an 4 25

NBC News reports the 2028 election is already underway with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) unleashing a blistering attack on Vice President JD Vance at the prestigious Connecticut university where he obtained his law degree.

“Let me say this as clearly as I can: JD Vance, your cold indifference to the lives of vulnerable immigrants betrays every principle that this law school was built to uphold,” Khanna said in a speech at Yale Law School. “Your affiliation with this law school is now a stain on the degree of every Yale graduate.”

“Vance has not only declared war on the courts, but on the universities. And it is no accident,” he continued. “As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university.”

His speech came a day after the Trump administration froze more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard University after it rejected Trump’s demands to address so-called campus “antisemitism,” which also happens to mandate the elimination of Harvard’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The demands also include banning masks at campus protests, merit-based hiring and admissions reforms and the targeting and disempowering of faculty and administrators the administration views as “more committed to activism than scholarship.”

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Almost 900 Yale faculty members published a letter to their leadership this week expressing support for standing up to the Trump administration alongside Harvard.

“We stand together at a crossroads,” the letter read. “American universities are facing extraordinary attacks that threaten the bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and academic freedom. We write as one faculty, to ask you to stand with us now.”

Khanna noted Vance’s response to the mistaken deportation and offsite incarceration of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador. Vance falsely refers to Garcia as a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” despite Garcia having no record here or abroad. He also falsely calls him “an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country,” despite a 2019 protection order against his removal from the U.S.

“When Americans asked for due process, [Vance] answered not with reason, but with feigned rage — accusing us of sympathy for a gang member,” Khanna said.

Read the full NBC article at this link.

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an ah 4 22

since its formation 29 years ago in 1993, the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has consistently fought against gay rights — often equating anti-gay discrimination with religious freedom. When Kristen Waggoner, legal counsel for ADF, spoke at Yale University on March 10, about 120 students protested her appearance. And in Utah, two well-known Republicans — Sen. Mike Lee and State Attorney General Sean Reyes — have added their names to a letter demanding punishment for Yale students who**protested**the March 10 event.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Bryan Schott explains, “More than half of the school’s students signed an open letter critical of the decision by the Federalist Society to invite Waggoner to speak and condemned the presence of armed police at the protest. Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said the protest was ‘unacceptable’ behavior from the students, but they had not violated the school’s free speech policy.”

Co-founded by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, the ADF (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) represents a far-right form of White evangelical Christian fundamentalism and is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

“In addition to Lee and Reyes,” Schott reports, “Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, several U.S. House of Representatives members, five governors, and more than two dozen other state attorneys general also signed on. The letter was drafted by the same group responsible for the Philadelphia Statement, a document that decries the persistence of ‘cancel culture’ in American society. More than 1400 people signed the letter to Yale.”

The letter reads, “Instead of engaging with the panelists, a shocking number of Yale Law students hurled constant insults and obscenities at them.” But according to Schott, “The letter’s depiction of the event is primarily based on an initial report from the conservative Washington Free Beacon. That reporting has been credibly debunked by other publications, multiple videos and the school’s official account of the incident.”

Some of the debunking came from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. On March 18, Stern reported, “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began. Their exercise in free speech, however rowdy or distasteful, did not prevent the panelists from expressing their views. And their demonstration did not — contrary to the Free Beacon’s reporting — require administrators to summon the police.”

apr 7

https://thephillystatement.org/group-of-1400-plus-including-40-plus-elected-officials-call-on-yale-law-school-to-take-action-following-hecklers-veto-fracas/

phillwy st:

yale Law School has dominated much of the news over the past month, but unfortunately for the once-vaunted institution, this seems to be one rare exception to the time-tested adage “there’s no such thing as bad press.”

On March 10, Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Kristen Waggoner and American Humanist Associationattorney Monica Miller went to Yale Law School to discuss Ms. Waggoner’s recent U.S. Supreme Court victory on campus free speech. They were greeted by a mob of nearly 120 law students who showed up to hurl insults and disrupt a legal panel discussion about remedies for First Amendment violations on college campuses.

Ultimately, Ms. Waggoner and her fellow female panelist had to be escorted away from the event by Yale police. It wasn’t safe for them to leave on their own.[not true? wfb bs?]

The incident has evoked public criticism from across the ideological and political spectrum. Those considered left of center, like esteemed law professor Erwin Chemerinsky (Berkley Law) and Chancellor Howard Gillman (UC Irvine), along with those considered right of center, like the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, have spoken out to denounce this unsettling instance of cancel culture.

And now, you can add to the list of critics a group of over 1,400 Americans, including many Philadelphia Statement signatories, who signed a letter to Dean Heather Gerken of Yale Law School on April 7, urging her administration to take tangible steps to address the rapidly deteriorating culture of free speech and civility on campus. This letter represents one more example of those across the political divide finding common ground to support free speech.

Notable signatories on the letter include five current governors, 24 state attorneys general, U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, and several members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Other public figures include Ben Carson, Jordan B. Peterson, Dr. Robert George, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dr. Kevin Roberts (President, Heritage Foundation), Elise Westhoff (President, Philanthropy Roundtable), Governor Scott Walker (President, Young America’s Foundation), Dr. Peter W. Wood (President, National Association of Scholars), and Eli Lehrer (President, R Street Institute).

“Dean Gerken, we urge you to take concrete action to correct the course of Yale Law School,” the letter states. “Our nation desperately needs the next generation of attorneys, legislators, judges, and Supreme Court justices to be marked by the character and values that undergird the American legal profession and a free society. These include, at the very least, respect for the right to freedom of speech, a commitment to living peacefully with one another despite differences, and esteem for truly open dialogue and debate.”

The signatories also note that students targeted Ms. Waggoner based on the discredited word of the morally bankrupt Southern Poverty Law Center—whose rhetoric has previously inspired unruly and violent behavior on and off campuses throughout the U.S.

The letter ends by calling upon Dean Gerken to take steps to cultivate a free speech culture at Yale Law School, take appropriate disciplinary action consistent with Yale’s free speech policies against the students involved in the inappropriate and dangerous incident, and correct or retract Yale Law School’s previous statements that downplayed the students’ unruly and threatening behavior.

You can read and sign the letter here.