I AGREE WITH BRIAN LEITER THAT THIS IS A VICTORY FOR JUDGE HO: Yale Law Dean Trumpets Free Speech Stance Amid Federal Judges’ Clerk Boycott.

And there’s more going on. Harvard is actively poaching conservative applicants to Yale, promising them that administrators at Harvard, unlike Yale, won’t sabotage job opportunities or drum up mobs of woke students to chase them out of town. This appeals to many. The real game here is knocking Yale out of its #1 slot in the U.S. News rankings, which it’s held forever. Being the dean who let that happen would permanently tarnish Dean Heather Gerken’s career, regardless of what else she does, and she knows that. Harvard, of course, would like to be #1 almost as much as they’d like to see Yale knocked down a peg or two.

Harvard hurts Yale two ways — losing top students might hurt Yale’s entering-class stats enough to knock it down (the margins between places in the rankings are pretty thin, making Yale’s continued reign at the top all the more impressive). But the reputation ranking is huge too. And one of the groups that votes on this is academics, and another is federal judges. If Yale gets in a pissing match with federal judges, and they seem like they might be taking the bait, the risk of being downrated enough to matter is non-trivial.

Gerken has just been awful throughout this whole thing, and I’m disappointed because she started off looking quite sensible. Former deans like Guido Calabresi, Tony Kronman, or even Harold Koh wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. But YLS really hasn’t been the same since they brought in Bob Post, and Gerken is unfortunately more in his mold.