Students gathered Thursday in the mock court room at Loyola University Law School in Uptown.
In front of them on the big screen, Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into allegations that threaten to derail Brett Kavanaugh's lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court played.
Christine Blasey Ford has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her years ago at a high school party. The hearing provided a real life learning opportunity for the group of future attorneys.
“We're not, through this hearing, trying to come to the truth of the matter of whether or not this happened," third-year law student Leila Abu-Orf said. “This is about whether or not Judge Kavanaugh is qualified to be on the Supreme Court. I think what Dr. Blasey Ford has brought forth has really brought some serious doubt to that.”
“You should definitely be held accountable,” second-year law student Malika Howard said of the allegations. “It doesn't matter if it happened in high school, middle school. If you assaulted someone, you assaulted someone.”
Others students noted the political drama surrounding the hearings.
“You have the president yesterday calling this a ‘con job,’ saying that the democrats are politicizing it,” third-year law student Kevin Fitzgerald said. “But, he himself yesterday has politicized it so much further. That's just not fair. That's not presidential.”
“It's been kind of a circus,” third-year law student Delaney Vollmer said. “It's definitely political. Absolutely.”
Law School Dean Madeleine Landrieu, a former judge, said the hearings are a powerful reminder of the work she has done from the bench.
“This is tough stuff,” Landrieu said. “It's easy for us to make credibility calls on people we don't see and we don't know and we're not in the presence of. This is really the beauty of the justice system, where we have an opportunity for people to confront one another and hear directly from the source.”
Landrieu called it a historic day in America and said it was really simple for the school to make the hearings available for students to watch.