Jerry Solomon then secured passage of his amendment, offering these schools a simple deal: To receive any money from the Defense Department, a school must give military recruiters the same access it gives recruiters from other employers. The law was later expanded to include funding from the departments of labor, health and human services, education, transportation and homeland security, and to make clear that if any "sub-element" of a school denied equal access to military recruiters, the entire school would lose access to federal tax dollars.
Solomon's law was firmly based on a principle often touted by liberal professors at the very law schools now claiming it is unconstitutional. This principle is freedom of choice. Schools are free to choose whether to accept U.S. tax dollars in exchange for providing equal access to U.S. military recruiters. They can refuse the tax dollars and the recruiters. But if they take the dollars, they must take the recruiters.
Either way, the schools, their students and their faculty can say whatever they wish about the U.S. military, no matter how uninformed, unjustified or ungrateful it is.
Even when they take the federal money and the military recruiters that come with it, the law schools suing Rumsfeld can still stage demonstrations against military recruiters, plaster their campus walls with anti-military posters, and publish books and legal briefs espousing their distaste for the very institution that other Americans join when they are willing to risk lives to protect the right of even liberal law professors to speak freely.
In the meanwhile, the Supreme Court should remind Harvard, Yale and the other law schools that for them, no less than for car salesmen, a deal's a deal.