Justice, Law Schools

Is Genocide A Good Enough Reason For These Law Schools To Change Their Names?

Stanford and Hastings Law have difficult histories to deal with.

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If the founder of your school “helped to facilitate genocide” of Native Americans, would you support a change in the school’s name? Sure, the name recognition of the school — something which may seem minor, but for which you may have paid a premium in tuition dollars — would inevitably take a hit, but in the face of some truly reprehensible actions, is there a “moral” case for making the change?

That query is at the heart of a recent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by John Briscoe, a Distinguished Fellow of the Law of the Sea Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law and an adjunct professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. Briscoe is taking one of his employers, UC Hastings Law, as well as Stanford University to task over the sins of their namesakes. According to research cited by Briscoe, Serranus Hastings and Leland Stanford were directly involved in financing Indian hunting expeditions (yes, that’s exactly what you think it is — killing humans for sport), and they were able to amass real estate fortunes as a result:

After 1834… when the native [Californian] population plummeted from 150,000 to 18,000, the cause was different: Indian hunting was sport for the mostly white gold-seekers and settlers. Indian-hunting raids nearly annihilated the population and had the added benefit of ridding the state of those who might assert their land rights, rights guaranteed under international law.

Serranus Clinton Hastings was promoter and financier of Indian-hunting expeditions in the 1850s. Hastings later founded Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, now the oldest law school in the state, and a part of the University of California system.

Leland Stanford solicited volunteers for his Civil War-era army campaigns against California Indians and, as governor, signed into law appropriations bills to fund those killing expeditions. He later founded Stanford University in the name of his son, Leland Stanford Jr. Both Hastings and Stanford had made fortunes in real estate.

Their ability to acquire land titles was facilitated by the massacre of the rightful claimants, a near-extinction they promoted and funded. As UCLA professor Benjamin Madley wrote in his sobering “An American Genocide,” published in 2016 by none other than Yale University Press, both Stanford and Hastings had “helped to facilitate genocide.”

It’s hard to sweep aside such atrocities as relics of a time gone by — we are talking about organized hunts to kill human beings, a move they uniquely benefited from financially. They then turned around and used that money to create legacies such that 150+ years later, generations of law school grads would still feel allegiance to those names.

Tempered with the natural moral outrage is the reality that the schools may be contractually obligated to keep the schools’ names. And even if they have the liberty to make a change, we are not talking about the name of a lecture hall, a mascot,[1] or a dorm — this is the name of the entire school. Any name change would be a massive undertaking that would involve lots of time, money and outrage (on both sides of the issue). We don’t call it Rhodesia anymore… but we do still have the Rhodes scholarship, proving this is a thorny issue.

We reached out to spokespeople for the schools. UC Hastings responded with the below statement, announcing the commissioning of independent research on the issue, and a committee to review the findings:

We take this issue very seriously. As a public law school, we have an obligation to operate transparently and for the public good. Accordingly, we are enlisting an historian to engage in independent research on the history and circumstances of Serranus Hastings’s legacy and gift to the State of California to establish our law school in 1878 with his name attached to it.

In addition, we are putting together a diverse committee from our community to review the research and assess all material relevant to this historical issue. This committee will make recommendations regarding the most appropriate way to recognize and come to terms with the history of the college’s founder.

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We have not as yet heard from Stanford; we will update this story if we do.

UPDATE: We’ve heard from Stanford University regarding the naming controversy. A spokesperson referred us to this 2016 article detailing the creation of the university’s naming committee. The committee is charged determining the principles for renaming landmarks named after figures “whose legacies have been called into question.” As to the specific question of Leland Stanford’s acts, the spokesperson said:

The committee continues to work on the criteria by which we would evaluate naming or renaming.

[1] Let’s not forget Stanford is no stranger to renaming. In 1972, the school changed their mascot from the Indians — yes, the Cardinal used to be known as THE INDIANS. Given Leland Stanford’s history, the name appears even more astonishingly insensitive.

The moral case for renaming Hastings College of the Law [San Francisco Chronicle via TaxProf Blog]

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headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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