The attempt by the country's leading law schools to ban recruiters from the military's Judge Advocate General Corps has long been a self-indulgent and, ultimately, futile effort. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (the ostensible reason for the schools' ban, something of a cover for these institutions' deeper and decades-long hostility to the military) came about via congressional statute and can only be repealed by Congress. Filling the military's ranks with people who oppose the ban on gays (the sort of people more likely to be found at elite, Ivy League institutions) is a significant way in which to change the military's attitude on this policy. And once the military wants "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" lifted, Congress will readily comply. So it is welcome news that Yale Law School, which led the specious legal effort to maintain its ban on JAG (and lost in an 8-0 Supreme Court decision last year), has finally decided to allow recruiters the same access that it gives everyone else. This afternoon, JAG recruiters will sit alongside representatives of corporate law firms and non-profits interviewing applicants from Yale Law. Peter Beinart wrote an excellent piece last year suggesting that Hillary Clinton give a speech at Columbia (whose law school filed an amicus brief in the 2006 Supreme Court case) urging the university to welcome military recruiters. This is not only the right position for a presidential candidate to take, he argued, but would also go a long way in repairing the Democratic Party's image on national security. A good idea, and something with which Hillary probably agrees. But it's doubtful Columbia would listen to her even if she did make this effort; the university has somehow justified shunning those who want to serve their country based upon its opposition to the military's anti-gay policy, yet simultaneously welcomes a theocratic dictator whose regime murders homosexuals. --James Kirchick