Exclusive: Disbarred Attorney John Eastman Tells the Sun Amy Wax’s Lawsuit Against Penn Is ‘Bellwether of a Broader Fight Over Cancel Culture’

The disbarred lawyer John Eastman is joining forces with the fired professor Amy Wax in opposition to what he calls “despicable cancel culture” as she presses her discrimination lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania.Mr. Eastman tells the Sun on the telephone that Ms. Wax is “one of the smartest people” he knows and that his client was “retaliated against” by the Ivy League School. He contends that her case is a “bellwether of a broader fight over cancel culture and wokeness” and that if Penn triumphs, the “idea of institutions of higher learning based on truth is gone.”Mr. Eastman adds that he was “honored” to take on Ms. Wax as a client and that he is determined to best in court the “multi billion dollar industry that is trying to shut down Amy.” He reckons that the strength of Ms. Wax’s case merits “automatic reversal.” Mr. Eastman filed a notice of appearance in Ms. Wax’s civil case last week, five months after California stripped him of his law license for his work advising President Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. This week Mr. Eastman filed a petition of certiorari to the Supreme Court to undo that disbarment. He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania, where Ms. Wax’s case is based.Ms. Wax’s case is pending before the Third United States Circuit Court of Appeals, which is based in Philadelphia. Mr. Eastman, who clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, served as dean of Chapman University School of Law, and ran unsuccessfully for attorney general of California in 2010, is set to present Ms. Wax’s case to the Third Circuit at oral arguments in November.Ms. Wax sued Penn in January 2025 after she was punished with a one-year suspension despite her status as a tenured professor at the Ivy League law school. That discipline followed an investigation into statements she made about minority groups. Her lawsuit alleges that Penn holds white professors to a different standard than minority ones with respect to freedom of speech. A federal judge dismissed the case in August of 2025, finding that claim to be “implausible.” Ms. Wax appealed to the Third Circuit.In 2023, Ms. Wax, who graduated from Harvard Medical School and has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court, told The New York Sun that “Universities need to have room for people like me to explain the opposition and above all, to explain to students that there is another point of view.” Penn Law, though, reckoned in a report that Ms. Wax exhibited a “callous and flagrant disregard for our University community” in the form of “incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements.” The school found that faculty “call her presence demoralizing and disruptive.”In a grievance filed against Penn, Ms. Wax argues that no faculty member has “ever been formally charged with an infraction of University rules based on what he or she has taught, written, assigned to students, or opined in the media. No one.” Ms. Wax told the Sun that she traversed the “unseen borderland” that cuts through campus, beyond which “dissent is not tolerated.”In 2018, Ms. Wax was banned from teaching required first-year courses after she said on a podcast that she had never seen a black law student graduate in the top quarter of his or her class, and rarely in the top half. In 2022, she wrote on a blog that America would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” if those groups vote for Democrats. In 2021, she invited a white supremacist, Jared Taylor, to speak to her seminar on “Conservative and Political Legal Thought.”Mr. Eastman declared in a statement that “I was delighted to accept Professor Wax’s request to represent her on this important appeal. In many ways, Penn’s efforts to cancel her are part of a broader, despicable cancel culture of which my own Cal Bar proceedings are a part.” Ms. Wax’s punishment from Penn included not only the suspension but also the permanent loss of her named faculty chair and summer pay.Mr. Eastman’s appeal to the Supreme Court argues that “While states may regulate genuine attorney misconduct, they may not use disciplinary authority to punish protected advocacy by relabeling it as professional misconduct.” California’s bar, though, found that he violated ethics rules against misleading courts and making false public statements when he advised Vice President Pence that he could refuse to accept electoral votes from several swing states.Mr. Pence refused that counsel, and instead presided over the certification of the vote that was interrupted by the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mr. Eastman spoke at the rally at the Ellipse that preceded that violence. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal case against Mr. Trump, and was charged in the racketeering case brought by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis. Both were eventually dismissed.Mr. Eastman tells the Sun that “way too many” Supreme Court advocates declined to take his case “because it is Trump adjacent.” He calls that a “terrible indication of our profession” and adds that “what’s at stake is the entire profession being afraid to stand up for conservative clients.”

Exclusive: Disbarred Attorney John Eastman Tells the Sun Amy Wax’s Lawsuit Against Penn Is ‘Bellwether of a Broader Fight Over Cancel Culture’

Exclusive: Disbarred Attorney John Eastman Tells the Sun Amy Wax’s Lawsuit Against Penn Is ‘Bellwether of a Broader Fight Over Cancel Culture’

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