Law school graduate argues ideological imbalance at Utah and nationally leaves lawyers unprepared for adversarial practice

Alessandra Coote, a 2026 graduate of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law and a 2014 West Point graduate who served as an Army engineer officer, wrote in the Washington Examiner that law schools are producing graduates who have not been adequately prepared for the adversarial demands of legal practice. Coote argued that law school's core responsibility is to teach students how to think like lawyers — through rigorous adversarial debate — rather than to signal which legal or political conclusions are correct.

Coote described her experience at Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law as one where progressive faculty treated left-leaning arguments as inherently correct while conservative arguments were dismissed or discouraged. She cited a first-year class discussion of the Fourth Amendment's plain view doctrine as an example, writing that classroom time was devoted to debating the race and socioeconomic status of defendants rather than the constitutional doctrine governing whether officers could lawfully seize a firearm in plain view. She said politics and social issues frequently displaced doctrinal analysis in classroom discussions.

Coote served as president of the school's Federalist Society chapter, which she described as an attempt to create space for open debate. She recounted that students in a Federalist Society meeting were informed of the assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk — which occurred approximately 40 miles from campus — and that upon leaving the room they encountered classmates celebrating the news. She wrote that the incident hardened political divisions across the school and that faculty rhetoric reinforced those divisions, including by characterizing the Federalist Society as a single-ideology organization rather than a coalition of originalist, textualist, libertarian, and conservative viewpoints.