Law schools are training lawyers who can’t take a punch

Lawyers, like boxers, are forged through adversity, not affirmation. At West Point, I boxed on the women’s boxing team. I spent hours drilling footwork, shadowboxing, and stepping into the ring to spar. I learned I was a terrible boxer, but I loved the challenge of testing my body under pressure and learning, albeit painfully, from every mistake. I expected law school to provide the intellectual equivalent. At the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, I expected to intellectually spar with classmates who were smarter than I was. Law school, after all, is supposed to prepare students for a profession built on adversarial testing of ideas. Instead, I found an environment that avoided intellectual conflict. Law schools should not teach students what to think about the law before teaching them how to think like lawyers. Their responsibility is to prepare students to test competing legal theories through rigorous adversarial debate.The progressive faculty at my school treated left-wing arguments as inherently right, while conservative arguments were dismissed or discouraged. The result chilled conservative voices and deprived every student of the rigorous debate necessary to become a capable lawyer. In first-year classes, professors frequently introduced Supreme Court opinions with these right and wrong labels before students had mastered the doctrine itself. Politics and social issues continually hijacked classroom discussion, crowding out debate on the issues. In one class, for example, we examined the Fourth Amendment’s plain view doctrine and the limits of police search. Rather than focusing on whether officers could lawfully seize a machine gun plainly visible in the defendant’s living room, the discussion centered on the race and socioeconomic status of the defendants. Those issues may deserve consideration, but they did not answer the legal question before us. We spent more time debating the morality of the search than the constitutional doctrine governing it. If the classroom was not an arena for intellectual sparring, students had to create one themselves. That conviction led me to serve as president of our chapter of the Federalist Society. Although the organization is associated with conservative and originalist legal thought, its stated mission is to foster open discussion about the principles of individual liberty, limited government, and separation of powers. I aimed to create an arena where ideas could spar. For our first event, we invited a federal court of appeals judge to speak to students on National Constitution Day. The goal was to kick off a year of open debate. Then, just 40 miles from our campus, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. We learned of the shooting during a meeting for students considering joining the Federalist Society. When students walked out of the room, they found their classmates cheering and high-fiving one another, celebrating Kirk’s assassination. The atmosphere changed almost overnight. Political tribal lines hardened. In and out of class students sorted one another along these lines, creating an atmosphere of distrust throughout the school.Rather than confronting that division, faculty rhetoric reinforced it. Professors spoke of the Federalist Society as though it represented a single ideology, reducing a diverse body of originalist, textualist, libertarian, and conservative thought to a caricature. After Kirk’s assassination, I felt I was arguing not against my classmates, but against assumptions embedded within the school itself. The school did not fail because it failed conservative students. It failed all students because it did not create an environment where ideas could spar. Students graduate ill-prepared to confront theories in practice. This makes everyone a worse lawyer. Originalism and textualism now occupy a central place in American law. Whether students embrace those theories or reject them, they must be prepared to understand and argue them in court. Lawyers who never confront the strongest version of an opposing theory enter practice unprepared. The University of Utah’s law school failed to prepare students to step into these rings. The polarization afflicting the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law reflects a broader national trend, but the school has created these issues through its hiring decisions. At the University of Utah, the faculty overwhelmingly leans left. The makeup of the faculty chills debate before the students can enter the classroom. Law schools should strive for intellectual diversity among their faculty because students follow that leadership. An intellectually diverse faculty demonstrates to students how first-rate scholars can disagree, debate, and respect one another. A faculty that overwhelmingly leans toward one side of the debate cannot achieve this objective. At our core, lawyers on all sides of the political spectrum share a commitment to the Constitution and a desire to strive for that more perfect union. We are on the same team. However, when the law school hires almost exclusively left-wing professors, it is making a statement that only one side of that debate is worth hearing.WHEN POLITICS BECOMES YOUR IDENTITY, DISAGREEMENT BECOMES WARThe ideological imbalance at the University of Utah is not an isolated problem. Left-wing bias in legal education is a national crisis. A 2026 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression of nearly 2,000 faculty members across 192 ABA-approved law schools found that 57% of respondents identified as liberal, compared with 18% who identified as conservative. More troubling, 61% of conservative faculty described their law schools as hostile to their political beliefs, and 52% reported hiding their political beliefs from colleagues at least occasionally in an effort to keep their jobs. When even professors are reluctant to enter the intellectual ring, students lose. Law schools are producing lawyers who have never learned to take a punch.Members of my boxing team went on to national championships; one qualified for the Olympic trials. They made me a better boxer. Good boxers are forged by opponents who expose their weaknesses. Good lawyers are forged the same way. A law school’s responsibility is not to tell students which interpretation of the law is right or wrong. It is to ensure they can enter any courtroom prepared for any fight.Alessandra Coote is a 2014 graduate of the United States Military Academy and a 2026 graduate of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. She served as an Army engineer officer with the 10th Mountain Division and in South Korea with the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission. A Philadelphia native, she boxed southpaw at West Point.