Yale Law School Begging Yale University To Find Its Spine Against Donald Trump

The dean of Yale Law School and a good chunk of its faculty are quietly trying to stop Yale University from cutting a deal with the Trump administration. A wild turn of events for a law school once called a “model of complicity.” Too bad it seems as though their parent university is still looking to cower.

According to the New York Times, Dean Cristina Rodriguez and her colleagues have been lobbying Yale’s leadership to walk away from settlement talks over the ongoing DOJ investigation into admissions, arguing — correctly — that the administration cannot be trusted and that folding threatens both the university’s independence and the rule of law. The report suggests that Dean Rodriguez may have even floated the idea that the law school be carved out of any agreement the university enters.

Back in 2018, the school cheered on alumnus Brett Kavanaugh via official press release, and a Yale Law professor published a Wall Street Journal essay titled “Kavanaugh Is a Mentor to Women.” Then Kavanaugh helped push Students for Fair Admissions, the 2023 decision ending race-conscious admissions, across the line. That ruling is the legal basis of the DOJ’s effort to bully Yale into a series of concessions aimed at allowing the Trump administration to micromanage the school. Bang up job, you guys.

“Yale’s leaders have privately contended that they may need to strike a deal to ensure the university continues to receive federal funding,” a source told the Times. Interesting theory… as it happens, there’s a control group.

Harvard sued and won when the administration came for their funding. A federal judge found the government had used antisemitism as a smokescreen for an ideological assault and ordered roughly $2.7 billion in grants restored. Harvard may have flirted with writing a check too, though Trump himself floated the potential $500 million settlement from Harvard, in the same register that he keeps telling us that he’s cut drug prices 1500 percent, so take it with several grains of salt.

Yale University leaders seem to be ceding their inferiority to Harvard, which should mark the quiet end to any serious comparison of the two institutions if Yale stays the course. It’s also, bizarrely, embarking on this path long after the administration established a solid record of breaching its agreements. After Columbia bent over for the administration, agreeing to multiple demands in March 2025 and Trump just came back and demanded another $200 million. Biglaw firms making deals with Trump rapidly found themselves in the “and Find Out” stage when the administration altered the deals. We’ve had a peace deal with Iran supposedly in place for weeks now. It’s simply not worth trying to deal with these buffoons.

UVA also made a deal with the Trump administration, leading to UVA’s president, James Ryan, resigning under DOJ pressure and the school promising to hand over quarterly compliance certifications for years. That experience should serve as a warning for Yale on another level. Yale has hired McGuireWoods to handle its negotiations — the same firm that represented UVA.

Ryan later wrote a long letter about the experience, and one line stands out:

I do not know if [McGuire Woods attorneys] were exercising their independent judgment or receiving directions from a board member and/or the attorney general’s office.

The AG in that instance was a Republican working with Trump. So a former client is saying, in writing, that he could not tell whether his own lawyers were working for him or for the people across the table. If Yale Law wants a professional responsibility issue-spotter, that allegation is one of the most damning an exam could pose. Strip out a lawyer’s independent professional judgment and you don’t have counsel as much as a chaperone walking your surrender across the street.

It doesn’t exactly help the optics that one of the McGuireWoods lawyers on the matter had worked on Project 2025. For its part, McGuireWoods did not respond to the Times when the paper asked for comment.

When it comes to hiring McGuireWoods, UVA had a structural reason that Yale does not. Virginia is a public university, and its counsel is effectively appointed through the state attorney general — a Republican ally of the administration — which is how UVA wound up, as UVA’s former university counsel put it, “saddled with counsel aligned with the other side.” But Yale can hire whoever they want! With the entire American legal market available to the Ivy League institution, it saw a firm whose last foray into this exact issue ended with its client publicly wondering if the firm acted to undermine the school, and thought: “perfect!”

The Times piece cites former dean Robert Post saying that the university’s leaders don’t confront the law school faculty on legal issues as much as they should. Yale Law’s current leadership is pushing to change that.

Meanwhile, Harvard is already thinking up some really devastating signs for next year’s game.

Yale Law School Fights to Stop Trump Deal [New York Times]

Earlier: Biglaw Firms Making Trump Deals Reaching The ‘Find Out’ Phase
Biglaw Firms Making Trump Deals Reaching The ‘Find Out’ Phase
Trump Sues Harvard, Blames The Jews
Trump Makes Big Claim About A $500M Harvard Settlement
These Notorious Nine Biglaw Firms Will Never Be Able To Escape The Stench Of Their Trump Deals
Yale Law Students Protest, Referring To School As ‘Model Of Complicity’ When It Comes To Sexual Harassment

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.