GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY in northern Virginia renamed its law school the Antonin Scalia School of Law on Thursday, after receiving a $10 million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation and another $20 million from an undisclosed donor.
Scalia was one of five justices who voted for the Citizens United ruling and subsequent rulings that allowed unlimited sums of unidentified money to be used in elections. So the anonymous $20 million gift, which was conditioned upon naming the law school after Scalia, truly honors the late justice’s legacy of allowing corporations and the wealthy to buy influence under a shroud of secrecy.
www.law.gmu.edu
The Koch brothers have plowed more funding into the university than any other school; The Atlantic recently called the college “effectively Charles Koch’s personal academic workshop.” Koch’s $10 million gift to the law school follows $48 million in other donations from 2011 to 2014, according to the Associated Press.
The cash supports George Mason research hubs like the free-market Mercatus Center. Mercatus research routinely shows up in papers from Koch-linked groups like Americans for Prosperity, and even in Republican-written legislation. The Mercatus board includes Richard Fink, an executive vice president of Koch Industries, as well as Charles Koch himself. Charles Koch also chairs the board of the George Mason Institute for Humane Studies, a separate libertarian think tank.
The Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch identifies other links between the Mercatus Center and corporate money, including the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. It serves as the academic validator for right-wing ideas, much as Scalia served as the judicial conduit for such theories on the Supreme Court.
George Mason has undergone a number of transformations over the years. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared in 1971 that “George Mason College was conceived of, by, and for the white community of northern Virginia and not for the entire northern Virginia population.” Since Scalia observed last December that African-American students would be better off at “less advanced” colleges, the tribute to him at the formerly exclusionary George Mason also makes sense.
Over the years, George Mason transformed itself from a commuter school to a residential university, with its most recent, rapid growth fueled in part by money from conservative groups and individuals.
Its responsiveness to pro-corporate interests is hardly new. In the 1980s and 1990s, George Mason economist Robert Tollison led several programs on behalf of the tobacco industry, designed to provide intellectual support for its contention that secondhand smoke wasn’t harmful and government didn’t need to increase cigarette taxes. Hundreds of academics were paid by the tobacco industry for favorable comments, papers, and op-eds backing the industry line.
More recently, George Mason’s Law and Economics Center received $762,500 from Google over a two-year period, and subsequently produced multiple studies supporting Google’s positions on privacy, patents, and antitrust.
Justice Scalia’s reliable support for corporate America in a wide variety of cases makes him a fitting namesake for a law school there.
Top photo: Homepage for the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University.
To avoid long titles for the Law School of Charlie Koch,
the graduates will be called simply as KOCH suckers!
How about something more bland… American Fascist Law School..
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/scalia-law-school-switches-acronym-joke-article-1.2590015
I would hope some of the independent thinkers on campus could nickname and maybe put up banners substituting “Plutocrat’s School of Law” as an alternative to Scalia’s name.
“the Citizens United ruling and subsequent rulings that allowed unlimited sums of unidentified money to be used in elections.”
it also prevented the federal government from censoring a movie.
for a site that’s intertwined with Glenn Greenwald’s pro-1A legacy, the peripheral writers here are surprisingly anti-free expression.
The fact that the elite can give $20 million to a law school and be able to have influence by placing advocates on the board of the institution thus being able to select administrators, professors and influence the curriculum is an excellent example of how our Republic has become an aristocracy that the Founding Fathers foremost wanted to spurn.
By the elite’s buying of political influence enabling them to loot our treasury, which is largely how they create their vast wealth that they then put in foundations so their families can buy off politicians in perpetuity, is hardly what the Founders whom were aware and sensitive to the afflictions of inherited wealth had in mind.
The right wing influence that will be blanketed over this school will just further enable the corporatocracy to develop more justices like Antonin Scalia whom can be responsible in the future for more of the worst Supreme Court decisions like his Citizens United diktat, which was rivaled only by the Dred Scott ruling.
Justices like Antonin Scalia and Lewis Powell have been the foremost servers of the elite at the expense of the suffering masses. Powell’s Memo was of course instrumental in laying out the plan to secure the keys for the elite to our Republic thus opening the doors for them to control the likes of our media, and educational institutions.
Writing about the Democratic Party in The New York Times, former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley summarized:
When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964 … they tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.
Dunno know about now, but the majority of law students at GM used to focus on federal government administrative law, which would be right for the conservative types who can’t learn anything except process, no substance.
Is there a point to this article? Koch and Anon donor give money to rename a law school.
And? Where’s the beef? Or, what’s your beef with this, Dayen?
“GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY in northern Virginia renamed its law school the Antonin Scalia School of Law on Thursday, after receiving a $10 million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation and another $20 million from an undisclosed donor.”
Correlation is not causation; “Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: “after this, therefore because of this”) is a logical fallacy (of the questionable cause variety) that states “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.”
The money and the renaming have no connection, just as the tens of millions that Clinton and other politicians have received have no connection to their policy decisions.
Banks have a long history of giving away tens of millions out of sheer generosity. Likewise fossil fuel corporations, which give away money out of curiosity, never in expectation of a return. After all corporations are people too, and people can be kind.
So, is it your contention that large contributions are given without the expectation of getting something in return? How quaint. Quid pro quo is so 20th century.
Is this a serious comment? Even a blind man can see the quid pro quo here. $30M buys a hell of a lot of *quo* any day!!
It looks like George Mason refused to pay up – so the law school gets a new name. These things happen from time to time.
Those who are not fond of Scalia shouldn’t despair. They need to keep their shit together and eventually some other donor will come along and wipe ASSoL away.
You can’t get blood out of a turnip, Benitoe. George Mason has been dead for over 200 years now.
*his full bio sounds like a preamble to the Tea Party … and he is considered the ‘father’ of States Rights (ironically, imo, later used as a model of the U.S. Bill of Rights).
While he certainly may have influenced Justice Scalia’s opinions and thoughts I’m not sure if he had a ‘Brilliant Legal Mind’ like Scalia?
Best joke of the day! Thanks for that :-) Yes, I can see it now: “Dear ASSoL Alumni and friends, it’s time again for our annual Koch Brothers sponsored brown-nozeathon! Come one come all ASSoLs! Show us how far up Mr. Koch’s crack you can wedge yer noze!” Geez what a bunch of ASSoLs at that ‘law’ university :-D
We should name a law school after Carl Schmitt. You would have appreciated him, Duce. He wasn’t just a Nazi, he guided legal thought all through Weimar as well as into the Bundesrepublik period. I’m sure a lot of the George W. Bush lawyers built on his wisdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
Ashamed of being Italian, Scalia & Janet Napolitano.
Sacrilege.
You’re not really Italian at all, are you.
Sacrilege
You’re not really Italian at all, are you.
Real Italians are never ashamed of being Italian.
Also if you are actually being stalked, you might want to change your username as the current one looks like you’re advertising.
Ah Intercept, you think you wait long enough for a comment to show and this happens. Sadness.
What’s next? Josef Mengele School of Medicine? Bernie Madoff School of Business? Bill Cosby School of Women’s Studies?
Anything that can get them undue influence, and they’ll go for it. After all, corporations (entities on paper) are now “people”, remember?
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money has an interesting history of George Mason University’s role in providing cover for the Koch Brother’s agenda:
“In the mid-1980s, as called for in the first phase of Fink’s plan, the Kochs also began to establish an academic beachhead of their own. Their particular focus was on George Mason University, a little-known campus of Virginia’s prestigious higher-education system, located in the Washington suburbs. . . By 1981, Fink had moved his Austrian economics program there from Rutgers, eventually naming it the Mercatus Center. The think tank was entirely funded by outside donations, largely from the Kochs . . . ”
“George Mason’s economics department, meanwhile, became a hotbed of controversial theories that began to transform Americans’ tax bills, serving as an incubator for the supply-side tax cuts in the Reagan administration that hugely advantaged the rich. Paul Craig Roberts, an adjunct professor at GMU, drafted a precursor to the first supply-side tax cut bill of the Reagan era. . . .”
When you look at the Koch family’s associations with Hitler and Stalin, and also look at how those dictators had such a fascination with ensuring that their nation’s academic systems were ideologically loyal to their agenda – well, the similarities are remarkable.
Well said, needless to say the Bush family fits into the equation.
I’m sure $20 million is a reasonable cost in relation to the benefit this shy oligarch received from Scalia’s rulings.
Makes sense. The school’s new acronym will be ASSoL.
omg…you win
I suppose someone could name a law school after the late Justice Robert H. Jackson. It would be ironic, of course, because he didn’t finish college or law school, but simply passed the bar exam and started practice.
Scalia was a con man, as are most politicians in the u.s. Neither consistency nor adherence to the principles set forth by the DOI matter to them. Congress always passes laws subject to interpretation – in itself a conjob on America. And lucky for the repubbers they had a conman on the SCOTUS called “scalia” – a known racist.
http://gawker.com/black-former-law-students-of-antonin-scalia-recall-unfa-1759753655
Scaly also suggested that non-whites should attend a college more suitable to their learning styles.
The most appropriate term for slick scalia’s style of abuse of law might better be termed “shifty”.
GMU is where lots of disgraced conservatives land. These donations are a way to support their previous comfy life styles.
What’s in a name? Here in the WDC area there is a long standing joke about egotists naming things after themselves or their favorite whatever. Jack Kent Cooke, previous owner of the Warshington Redskin potatoes American pseudo football team abandoned RFK stadium for a multi-hundred-million dollar stadium he built so he could name it after himself. Six months after it opened he died and the team sold the naming rights to FedEx for about $20 million. Sic transit gloria mundi. So as soon as Charlie or whoever croaks, GMU will rename their law school after Thurgood Marshall, or perhaps after our star pundit Benito.
If you are going to worry about law schools, focus please on Stanford, who showed their fascist colors by hiring John Woo, the legitimizer of the US version of Aktion T4.
You mean Stanford’s crosstown rival UC Berkeley, whose Boalt Hall law school has John Yoo teaching Constitutional Law and stuff, tenured if I’m not mistaken. Having him teach Con. Law at UCB is as if Hannibal Lecter was teaching medicine at UC Medical, but these are strange days.
Oh, and another fun fact: Condoleeza Rice teaches global business and economics at Stanford.
No April fool.
Yes, Stanford finally showed their right wing hand, because hosting The Hoover Institution for decades was their way of being coy about it.
Where’s… the meat? You have nothing untoward visible here. A wealthy donor cut a big check to a university, got naming rights. Among all possible donation schemes, this is the missionary position.
If you could find that they have to hire certain professors, fire certain professors, make certain policies etc. then you’ll have something. The fact that they align with a political party’s court appointee, even the wrong one, is not something.
This is an especially lousy catch when you’re fishing at George Mason. I mean, that’s the spooks’ own university. There are fish in that water. Or go visit their technical campus, where they have the ATCC sending out anthrax and nearby there’s a FBI northern virginia headquarters surrounded by new cable and phone company internet buildings like a mamma rat surrounded by her pups. You couldn’t poke a stone in that part of the country without turning over something spooky – even one their school busses just got evacuated because the CIA inadvertently left part of a bomb on board (oops). And you come back with … a building named after a Supreme Court justice.
Wnt
Crafter of Artisan Wet Blankets
– personally woven and wet –
non-sarcastic question: why do you prefer that the Intercept write about stuff you already knew about George Mason U?
You guys realize that a supreme court’s judge’s job is to judge whether a law applies to a situation, and whether the law is valid under the constitution, right? The actual law itself was the work of the congress idiots – namely the McCain–Feingold Act.
Why does congress get a free on this?
If the law was not working as intended, congress had ample time to fix it since 2010. Yes, the law sucks, but if it’s constitutional, it’s not a judge’s role to strike down “the will of the people”.
“Get the money out of politic” was the slogan in the day. How’s that working out for you?
I am **REDACTED** and I approve this message.
Roberts re-wrote/interpreted the PPACA to fit Constitutional limits on Congressional power. The bench is not blind justice.
I don’t know anything about the law school, but the catalyst for the change from a commuter school to a head in the clouds university was the final four run. Without that, they’d still be just a dumping ground for people who can’t get into UVA or Tech.
Stupid article. Naming a law school building after Scalia is better than naming a stadium after “Petsdotcom” or some such. And large donations have historically been anonymous; there is nothing wrong with that. To equate it to anonymous campaign contributions is risible. (Oh, and Citizens United was correctly decided, by the way.)
The author simply doesn’t like Scalia’s legal positions and is taking every opportunity to denigrate him and his memory. Pointless.
Stupid comment. This has nothing to do with stadiums, the article points out that the school is a paper factory for corporate interests. Scalia would be proud to put his already denigrated name on this corrupted institution.
The commentator simply wants to complain about journalists doing their job. Hopeless.
The point of the article was lost on you, I’m sure you’ll get it the second time. You simply don’t like someone questioning the “laird” of society-ruining legal victories. Denigrating his memory not be difficult and I think the article even states his rulings paved the way to his “logo feces” to quote a wise man being smeared all over a school that has been for sale for quite some time.
Yes, because entities on paper (corporations) are flesh & blood humans, and as such those entities on paper should have freedom of speech rights to grease politicians with campaign contributions.
That’s the gist of Scaly’s insane CU argument.
Actually the article was excellent and spot on. You? Not so much. If you don’t see a problem with oligarchs basically buying a university outright and dictating to the staff there how to think, what to write to further the Koch’s Straussian ideology of gross licence then, well, maybe you should go work at that ASSoL law school. Maybe they need a new janitor or office temp.
Most of the coverage of this that I have seen has focused on the acronym (ASSoL). I wasn’t aware that this was the result of a donation to the school, but I’m not surprised that Charles Koch is involved, given that, from reading Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money, I knew he had funded Mercatus and other things at the school. I think it is worth noting as well that GMU is a public university – it’s part of the state university system in Virginia, not a private college. It is thus also a fitting reminder of what Koch and his ilk have been doing to public education at all levels – starving it of public funding and funneling some money to institutions that teach what they believe in.
As ambivalent as I am about Scalia personally, I would much rather see a building named for him rather than for Koch or whatever other rich guy donated the money. The self-glorification of money bothers me far more than slapping on the name of someone, however controversial, at least was significant in his field.
+1
I’m assuming this is an April Fools joke?
Probably not. The Koch Bros.’ announcement of a new retail chain, Mrs. Lovett’s Restaurant & Bakery Shoppe, probably is.
nah