Harvard Law School enters The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as a credential carried by guests and as a shorthand for a certain kind of elite legal formation. The excerpts do not describe the school’s founding, its curriculum, its faculty or its governance; they name it when introducing a speaker, when a speaker recounts his own training, or when a guest reaches for it as an example of the over-credentialed practice of law. What the sources do supply is a set of associations: Harvard Law as the background of a syndicated columnist and author, as the training ground of a law professor who edits the Harvard Law Review, as a place where a litigator has taught, and as a name invoked to make a point about how little of the public can afford a lawyer at all.
Ben Shapiro and the Hollywood episodes
In the August 2011 episode on Hollywood and what the host framed as propaganda, Bob Zadek introduced Ben Shapiro as a graduate of UCLA, which he entered at the age of 16, and of Harvard Law School, and as the author of Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). The Harvard Law reference functions in that introduction as part of a list of credentials — youngest nationally syndicated columnist at 17, author of several books — rather than as a subject of discussion.
Harvard Law returns later in the same episode in a more concrete way. Shapiro, describing how he came to write a television pilot, said that the producer Leonard Goldberg asked him to write a pilot based on his experiences at Harvard Law School. Shapiro recounted that he wrote the pilot, that it went into development, and that he then obtained an agent; about three weeks later the agent told him he was not sure the agency could represent him, because a producer who had been interested had Googled him, found his political writings, and said he would never work with anybody of that political persuasion Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). In Shapiro’s telling, the Harvard Law material was the raw subject of the pilot, and his politics — discovered by search rather than from the writing — were what stalled it.
The same episode also contains Shapiro’s broader account of discrimination in Hollywood. He said that if a person is openly right-wing, and specifically on social issues, that person will not work, and that at the time gay marriage was the dividing line; he said that anyone who voted for Prop 8 would not work in Hollywood if that became known. He named Kelsey Grammer, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gary Sinise as major Republicans working in Hollywood, adding that none of them were Republicans when they started. He also described the actress Patricia Heaton first telling him she had not been discriminated against, then calling back to say she had lost six specific jobs due to her political affiliation, and then asking not to be in the book for fear of not working Hollywood: Obama’s Ministry of Propaganda (2011). Harvard Law is not the subject of any of this; it is the setting of the pilot that became an illustration.
John McGinnis and the academy
In the February 2019 episode, Bob Zadek introduced John McGinnis as a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and as a teacher of constitutional law at Northwestern University, before turning to the political composition of the academy Here Comes the Storm (2019). Zadek said that much has been written about roughly 75% or 80% of the academy being registered Democrats or Democratic-leaning, and that teaching at the college level gives students a biased view of American history, politics and economics. The Harvard Law credential here sits inside a claim about the academy generally rather than about the law school.
McGinnis’s own contribution in the excerpt concerns socialism and healthcare. He said he agreed that Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris might be called extreme redistributionists rather than socialists, but that what they want to do to healthcare amounts to a great deal of government control of the means of producing healthcare, which he called a kind of socialist idea. He contrasted this with Obamacare, which he described as largely redistributionist, and said that Kamala Harris was flummoxed by a question about keeping private insurance because the bill she sponsored would get rid of all private insurance Here Comes the Storm (2019). Harvard Law School is present only in the introduction; the argument is about healthcare and the scope of government.
Harvey Silverglate and campus speech
The September 2011 episode on free speech on campus introduced Harvey A. Silverglate as an attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a co-founder of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and chairman of its board of directors, a litigator and columnist, and a man who has taught at Harvard Law School Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011). Silverglate described FIRE’s mission as taking on what he called the totalitarian mentality among administrators and some professors — mostly administrators — on American college and university campuses, and said FIRE began about 11 years earlier after he and Alan Charles Kors wrote The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. He said the book drew responses from hundreds of students and their parents about students being punished for saying things that were politically incorrect Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011). Harvard Law appears in this episode as a line on Silverglate’s résumé, not as a party to the dispute.
Harvard Law as a measure of over-credentialing
In the July 2021 episode with Clifford Winston, Harvard Law School appears in a different register — as a byword for unnecessary credentialing. Winston said it is amazing how few people realize that lawyers serve only a tiny share of the population, that most people cannot afford a lawyer and do not know how to get one, and that many of these people are in situations where you do not need somebody who went to Harvard Law School to get help; simple advice, even guidance on using LegalZoom, could help, and people just do not get it Trouble at the Bar (2021). He said he reports evidence in his book about estimates of how much of the public lacks access to legal services — the 80-plus percent — and evidence that people then defend themselves and lose much more often than those with representation, and that people facing immigration issues who defend themselves lose at a much higher rate than those who get a lawyer to help them Trouble at the Bar (2021). Here Harvard Law stands for the expensive, high-end end of a profession whose services most people cannot reach.
Winston’s other two headlines in the excerpt concern the performance of courts, in particular ideology on the Supreme Court, and the persistence of poor public policy despite decades of complaint. He asked how opening the legal profession to greater interaction with professionals and experts in other disciplines might reduce the ideology problem and lead to more effective and socially helpful decisions, and why poor public policy persists and what role the legal profession plays in both the inefficacy of public policy and its persistence Trouble at the Bar (2021). Harvard Law School is not mentioned in connection with any of these questions.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Harvard Law School across episodes. It is named in the 2011 Hollywood episode as Ben Shapiro’s degree and as the subject of a pilot he wrote, in the 2011 campus-speech episode as a place Harvey Silverglate has taught, in the 2019 episode as John McGinnis’s degree and the journal he edited, and in the 2021 episode as Clifford Winston’s example of a credential unnecessary for most legal problems. The speakers differ and the contexts differ, but the school itself is never the topic, and no later episode revisits or revises an earlier characterization.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when Harvard Law School was founded, where it is located, how it is governed or financed, what it teaches, who its current faculty or dean are, or how it is ranked. They do not describe admissions, tuition, grading, or the Harvard Law Review beyond John McGinnis’s having edited it. They contain no discussion of the school’s role in any case, statute or constitutional doctrine, and no guest offers an assessment of the institution as such. Everything the sources supply about Harvard Law School is incidental to an introduction or an analogy.