When Kirk Wolff sat down to do some homework on the law school campus of the University of Virginia (UVA) earlier this month, he didn't expect that he'd be threatened with expulsion. Wolff had brought two poster board signs with him as he sat outside—one read "GAZA RESETTLEMENT=WAR CRIME." On the other, he had written, "REFUSE ILLEGAL ORDERS."
On February 7, Wolff set up his folding lawn chair outside the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Legal Center and School, a training school for U.S. military lawyers hosted on the UVA campus. Wolff, who is a law student and a Navy veteran, wanted to make a statement in response to President Donald Trump's proposal that the U.S. take over the Gaza Strip. He hoped his presence would "remind those officers who are going to be making that decision of their moral and legal obligations to not comply with those orders because they would be unlawful," he tells Reason.
Before protesting, Wolff says that he scoured UVA's rules around student speech, going so far as to look up the land survey to ensure he was on UVA property, not the property of the JAG school. Still, when he sat down with his signs, he wasn't expecting trouble. He says that friends and classmates expressed concern when they learned about his plan to protest and asked whether he needed a legal observer. "I responded, 'No, this is totally innocuous….I'm just doing my homework," Wolff says. "It won't be a big deal. And it turned out that they were completely right, that I had every reason to be scared."
