I have practiced law for more than ten years, attended some of the institutions mentioned, and have worked in and with firms that would be considered "elite." I don't recognize any of the phenomena described in this article. Frankly the writer is either very far from the reality of modern legal practice (chasing noise in the system, without any real data) or she's viewing things selectively to serve some ideological purpose.
Most legal bills are paid by large corporations. The U.S. is the leader in this respect--on average U.S. companies spend about 0.4% of their revenue on legal services, almost triple the rate in a civil law country like Germany. Effectively most lawyers (including me) work directly or indirectly for businesses. This means that the legal education system, and to a lesser extent, the court system, are shaped by and largely serve the needs of businesses.
And what are all of these businesses doing with their legal spending? Largely litigation defense, transactions (M&A, issuing securities, or buying/selling assets like real estate), and interacting with government and regulators.
Lawyers that don't work for large business organizations spend their time representing individuals or classes of plaintiffs in tort litigation or in matters like criminal defense, immigration assistance, family law, or estate planning. Things that may not involve the huge dollar amounts of business transactions but that matter a lot to the people affected.
For every law school class on critical race theory or other topics the writer criticizes, a law student will take dozens on administrative procedure, taxation, federal courts, etc. etc. etc.
There are many valid criticisms of the American legal system. For example, you might feel that it's too easy to file a frivolous lawsuit that will settle for nuisance value. Or you might observe that corporations have been able to cripple or stall regulation that the public demands. Or that mass incarceration is bad social policy. This kind of introspection, including CRT, has long been a part of the academy and the profession, and I think a useful one.
The situation depicted in this article, that everyone's suddenly gone out of control "woke," is just ridiculous and doesn't at all fit my own experience.
CRT dates back to the 1970s. I assure you that the liberal NYU and Northwestern professors quoted in the article didn’t just wake up in 2022 and decide to complain about people saying that “mass incarceration is bad social policy.”
These trends are hitting academia and the non-profit sector first. At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/northwestern-univers...
My friend who works at a public interest organization—herself very liberal—has been surprised by attorneys refusing to work in cases because of the political beliefs of clients and donors (which have nothing to do with the organization’s purpose).
My constitutional law professor did some CRT scholarship in the 1980s and brought this perspective to our class* in an interesting way. The syllabus was pretty traditional, but he would add color, giving what he called "the conventional view" (basically, that the Supreme Court has steadily and inevitably protected the rights of minorities) and then his own view challenging this. It was far from indoctrination. Rather, he encouraged us to think critically about each decision and what it did and didn't do, and the institutional capabilities of courts vs. legislatures, rather than just vaguely celebrating social progress won through landmark decisions.
* circa 2009, when "CRT" was better known as a near-obsolete display technology than a boogeyman of the American political right.
> My constitutional law professor did some CRT scholarship in the 1980s and brought this perspective to our class* in an interesting way
Exactly. Which is why it's bizarre to suggest that liberal professors at NYU and Northwestern are suddenly upset in 2022 about something that was routinely taught when they went to law school. It's more reasonable to assume that they're responding to something else that they're observing.
> * circa 2009, when "CRT" was better known as a near-obsolete display technology than a boogeyman of the American political right.
"CRT" is just a vernacular shorthand for a collection of ideas that have become prevalent in certain circles in the last few years, which share common threads such as abandoning the ideal of race neutrality in law and policy. It's similar to how "supply-side economics" being used to refer to Reaganite economic policies. Whether those ideas are technically CRT is beside the point.
Opposition to that collection of ideas is not limited to the "American political right."
The "American political right," moreover, is hardly the only one that has realized that these ideas and policies share common roots. Emmanuel Macron, of the French center, has come out against them too: https://www.newsweek.com/macron-france-reject-american-woke-...
Insofar as more Democrats don't oppose CRT, I suspect it's because they haven't heard much about it or are skeptical that it's just a right-wing effort. But I sent this article to my dad--an immigrant from a Muslim country who has supported Democrats since Carter--and he expressed concerns about "critical race theory." Because he's a strong proponent of "color blindness" as a foundational principle of law and society. He was alarmed, as a public health expert, by proposals to prioritize non-whites for vaccinations. He was likewise alarmed by TJHSST, the high school I attended, recently abandoning its admissions test under the theory that it was "racist." I suspect there are a lot of Democrats like him who are skeptical that Republicans are acting in good faith, but don't actually agree with progressives that we need fundamental changes to our legal system.
>sent this article to my dad--an immigrant from a Muslim country who has supported Democrats since Carter--and he expressed concerns about "critical race theory."
Not sure how far this is the case in this instance, but immigrants (and many Americans) generally have a blind spot where race and law intersect in US history. Most have only consumed the prevailing narrative of US history promoted by the dominant society which is heavily sanitized to say the least.
After studying what would be considered heterodox US history (much of which can be verified by economic history) and becoming aware of the how gears have really worked in the US, I wonder how much of this "general ignorance" reality that I'm describing applies to your anecdata.
I would argue that what you call a “blind spot” is actually a fresh perspective: we judge for ourselves what America is like now, without our view being excessively colored by what happened in the past.
There’s lots of “data” you can bring to bear on this—poor asian children are more than twice as likely as poor white children to become affluent as adults. Hispanics (who mostly come here in poverty) have similar economic mobility to whites and converge economically with whites within a couple of generations. Etc.
My dad remarked the other day that, after more than 30 years in the US (in a county that was solidly red for the first 15 years we lived there, including right after 9/11), he was pleasantly surprised by how he had encountered almost no racism. My family members, who have immigrated all over the country, most recently to Texas, have had the same experience. And I don’t think these experiences are unrepresentative: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-americ...
Why do we need some history course to tell us that we’re oppressed?
For the people just arriving (post 1970 immigrants), ignoring this history can have little personal cost, atleast in the short term.
For the people that fought for the rights of non-European (Asian, African, South/Central American) immigrants including your Dad, to come here and also fought for the seemingly non-racist present your Dad enjoys, ignoring history is a betrayal of their sacrifices.
This ignorance is also used as a tool to attack their valid claims about extensions of the racist past that leak into the present and their long term losses as the earliest uncompensated investors in the US project.
The thing I find scary is what I call the "LatinX" phenomenon--(overwhelmingly white) progressives being able to dictate policies affecting minorities over the preferences of those minorities: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
A sobering example: if Justice Thomas votes against race-based college admissions in the Harvard case, white progressives will call him "racist" for adopting a view shared by 62% of Black people.
the latinx term is interesting, because ... it's purely made by whites for whites to be sure that they are not accidentally discriminatory in their language. because whites won't call out a latino person for using the term latino. (at least this is how I understand it.)
and even if latino folks have spoken up against it ... it's no use, because it's not about them, it's about (virtue signalling :D and partly) about a slightly justified ignorance of the needs of minorities. (and nowadays everybody writes to every single person on the planet at once - thanks to twitter - so maximal inclusive language became a proxy for actual inclusiveness.)
I don't think there's any conceit that it's about Hispanics qua Hispanics; isn't it supposed to be about gender? Like, I don't think a white progressive would claim they say that to make a Hispanic person feel comfortable, I think it's more about a) women and non-binary; b) a more abstract notion that this somehow makes the language less "sexist"
It was made up by a Puerto Rican academic, or so I’m told. But it was made popular by white people, who have the institutional power to decide which ideas coming from minority communities to promote or not, and which minorities to platform and not. Academic and activist ideas relating to minorities largely become popular based on how appealing they are to the white people who control the institutions, donor networks, and platforms.
To use a different example, my dad remarked the other day he was upset that Ilhan Omar had “become the face of Islam in America.” Of course, it’s white progressives in the media decide who gets used in stories as a proxy for minority groups. (There’s almost certainly more Muslim Republicans than Muslim DSA members, but you’ll never see one of the former be given the mike to speak on “Muslim issues.”) Likewise, it’s white liberals in university faculties that decide who gets tenured as an “Islamic Studies” professor. It’s also white liberals who bankroll most political activist groups claiming to speak for Muslim Americans. (CAIR might be an exception given foreign funding.)
Barring a recreation of the Muslim-GOP alliance of 2000, it’ll be white liberals who have the biggest say in appointing the first “Muslim” Supreme Court Justice. It will be no surprise that this person will think white liberals are right and the vast majority of Muslims are wrong on every issue where the two disagree.
I'm Muslim, and not particularly a fan of Ilhan Omar (though I also agree with her on many things). But she's not the "face of Islam in America" because "white progressives in the media" decided that. She's one of like 3 Muslims in Congress, all of whom happen to be very progressive. She's the only one who wears a hijab (i.e. she's more obviously Muslim and probably more genuinely religious than Ellison or Tlaib, as far as I can tell). I would bet Republicans would want her to be the face of Islam in America too--she unites two conservative bogeymen: Muslims and progressives.
> It’s also white liberals who bankroll most political activist groups claiming to speak for Muslim Americans. (CAIR might be an exception given foreign funding.)
??
What your dad is complaining about also represents a generational gap within the Muslim community. There are a lot of young Muslim Americans who are quite religious (more personally pious and abiding by the dictates of the religion than me, certainly) and simultaneously very comfortable identifying as progressive and allying with groups who hold views contrary to our religion's beliefs. For example, I was briefly the president of the Muslim Law Student's Association at Columbia. Our year and the previous year were not that practicing, but the year I was president, we had two incoming 1Ls join who were two hijabi girls who were simultaneously very religious and very progressive. They wanted to partner with all sorts of organizations whose beliefs are, in my view (and your dad's), inconsistent with Islam (i.e. pretty left LGBTQ groups). They also wanted to lobby the law school for prayer space within the building because they pray 5x a day.
What's more, plenty within the Muslim community, irrespective of age or views on social issues, believe that far-left positions on economics and also the environment are more consistent with Islam than moderate or conservative positions on those issues. Shit, I know a Muslim guy who voted for Trump because he hates feminism who agrees that market socialism is the most consistent economic position from an Islamic perspective.
> It will be no surprise that this person will think white liberals are right and the vast majority of Muslims are wrong on every issue where the two disagree.
Whose fault is that? Why fault liberals for appointing an ideologically-aligned justice instead of faulting Christian conservatives for their bigotry and short-term thinking w/r/t Muslims?
With due respect to you given our back-and-forth in this thread, what you're saying does not strike me as logically tenable, and instead seems more driven by a kind of emotional response. I agree with the general sentiment of being against this stuff, but I think you want to see what basically amounts to a kind of "conspiracy" here that doesn't exist. A huge part of why all of the issues raised in this thread exist is because of a dynamic where this country has tended to skew heavily conservative (compare us to the rest of the Western world) and biased, and substantive change seldom happens. IMO, there's a huge backlash factor at play that makes contemporary progressives more extreme than they should be.
Yeah the latinx thing is really dumb (REALLY dumb), but also harmless, esp since almost no actual Hispanic person says that shit.
Luckily Dem voters reject far left candidates in broader elections; see Biden, Eric Adams. Dems currently seem to elect moderates at a higher rate, whereas Republican moderates tend to have to retire (Flake, Kinzinger) or suffer vicious attacks and get voted out (Liz Cheney)
> Yeah the latinx thing is really dumb (REALLY dumb), but also harmless, esp since almost no actual Hispanic person says that shit.
It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.
> Luckily Dem voters reject far left candidates in broader elections; see Biden, Eric Adams.
I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r.
But there's a whole lot of things--especially the things addressed in this article--that are not put to a popular vote. Do so-called "people of color" actually want the ABA to change well-worn principles of color-blind justice in favor of affirmative anti-racism? Do "people of color" want hospitals to send white people to the back of the vaccine line? Do they want hiring policies that expressly consider race? It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.
One of the great things about Islam and also one of the problems where race and law are involved, is muslims have an extremely diverse racial distribution.
When somebody says Muslim, a particular race doesn't come to mind amongst the informed.
So their experiences and perceptions in a society where race has historically been a reasonably large part of weighting can be drastically different.
> It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.
Our Latino law school classmates at places like Northwestern and Columbia are by and large progressive, and thus that change likely reflected the preferences of the Hispanic student body at Northwestern Law. I'm not sure why the preferences of moderate Hispanics who aren't there should matter in that context.
> I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r...*It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.*
Bro, as you stated, they literally voted in the mayor in one of the most important--if not the most important--cities in the country lol. While the academic bubble is getting more progressive, New York went from having a progressive dodo for a mayor to having a moderate ex-Republican ex-cop as the mayor.
> At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting
To explain this a bit more: there was a fairly wide conversation during 2019/2020 about systemic advantages for white people in America. One observation was that systemic racism which favors a specific race could be described as inherently supremecist - in this case, white supremecist. If you accept that argument then benefitting from the system admits sympathy with white supremacy, and so saying “I’m a white supremecist and I’m trying to do better” is a way to admit to systemic problems and to state a desire to rectify them. If anybody remembers the blowup at the Basecamp all-hands meeting, this was the conversation that happened there. Unfortunately the line of logic is hard to communicate because “white supremecist” typically suggests an active intent to displace or destroy other races, which is why the dean’s statement seems so bizarre without context.
All of these conversations and examples are practically worthless without heaps of context, imo. The topic is too nuanced to look at a high-level list of events and draw general conclusions. It almost feels like our culture hasn’t developed a nuanced enough shared vocabulary to even be sure we’re talking about the same thing half the time. And that environment makes it incredibly easy to obscure truth with facts.
The metaphor I like to use is image resolution. In mass-communication, we communicate with 2x2 pixel images. Among friends with a lot of trust, we speak in 1080p. 2x2 communication just can't carry the context that we bake into each word during a conversation. I think this is an inherent property of mass communication and you really have to tailor your 2x2 message if you want to take it outside of high-bandwidth conversations.
I'm aware that left-wing activists use the term "white supremacy" to refer to a range of things other than what people understand as being "white supremacy." But it's not an academic term--it confuses rather than clarifies by taking a word that most people understand to refer to explosive racist animosity and applying it to inanimate "systems." It's an activist term, under which every white person is a "white supremacist," which was deliberately chosen for the resulting inflammatory effect.
So I'm at a loss how you think that the "context" helps. The whole point of the article is that law schools have adopted radical activist ideology. The fact that folksy faculty members of a Midwestern law school are using radical activist rhetoric (which, as you acknowledge, seems "bizarre" to the 95% of folks who are unfamiliar with the terminology) seems to support the article's thesis.
The dean didnt actually say (or write) that. The article links to the tweet screenshot which shows what they did say. (I have no idea if they 'stood up' while typing it).
Someone else said something a little closer to that, but still not that. I've also linked to the Dean's response elsewhere in the thread.
No, the line of logic is hard to communicate because the people proclaiming themselves white supremacists keep their jobs instead of replacing themselves with a black person and going to work as cashiers or Uber Eats drivers.
It doesn’t help that many of the people who advocate for this milquetoast definition (and CRT more generally) also drive the blurring of lines by persecuting ordinary people as though they were conventional white supremacists, invoking Nazi and KKK imagery, etc. Roughly the same group did the same thing with “feminism” earlier in the decade (“‘feminism’ just means ‘gender equality’”) and then again with “racism” (“you are against racism, aren’t you?”). It’s really remarkable how often so many CRT folks stumble into motte and bailey rhetoric relative to the wider population.
You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
> You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
It is a feature. If the ideology is splintered into many subfields, and has a legion of names, but all have broadly the same thrust, it's hard to talk about the phenomenon in a way that's easy to grasp. And in any case, you will have to give it a stable name you can refer to because the advocates themselves will just switch what name they're using, while the underlying ideal and methods stay the same.
This is one reason people are so angry at Rufo for pulling the CRT stunt and calling related things CRT. Is it wrong? Yes, in detail, but not in substance. And importantly, it is right in the part that matters and caught on, so people are losing their minds over it. Notice how they're not in the least visibly upset about, say, Wesley Yang calling wokeness "the Successor Ideology" - it never caught on, never managed to give people a name for the wrongness they could see with their own eyes.
There is a rhetorical strategy coined the motte and bailey, which gets its name from the motte and bailey fortification setup with a fortification (the motte) in the center and a broad, lucrative field around it. The idea is you can live in the lush bailey and expand it, and if attacked retreat to the more defensible motte to frustrate attackers. Once they are defeated or leave, you resume work in the broader field that can't be defended as well.
The motte and bailey rhetoric works the same way: When not pressed, you advance shakier, ambitious claims people might want to challenge, but when pressed equivocate that you're just talking about something unobjectionable.
As one example, second and third wave feminism unquestionably had an entire history and culture around them, with detailed theories of society w/ patriarchy, sex vs. gender and all - this wide, deep culture and spreading it is the bailey. Press people on some of the more tenuous aspects of this, and they'd retreat about "feminism being about equality" - this is the motte fortification, since barely anyone in the West is against equality at least in some form or another. Once the attacker goes away, back to spreading theories of patriarchy and oppression it was.
The modern wokeness runs this strategy all over the place. Want to curtail what you see as a blinkered approach to teaching history? You clearly don't want people learning about slavery or segregation, and so on. Racism is simultaneously the ordinary state of affairs in a country people actively want to immigrate to, and Klansmanship.
> attorneys refusing to work in cases because of the political beliefs of clients and donors
It's ironic that I heard Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing this morning, defending her work defending Guantanamo detainees as their public defender.
As she (rightfully imho and more eloquently) put it, a core aspect of the US legal tradition is that everyone deserves representation. Regardless of what they're accused of doing and who they are.
> Over the past week, certain corners of the Internet have identified and mischaracterized the events of a community conversation held at Northwestern Law on June 3, together with a few comments made at that event. Although we had hoped not to dignify these mischaracterizations with a response, they continue, with potentially harmful effects both to individual members of our community and to our community as a whole.
The wonderful thing about Zoom is that everything is in print and nobody needs to rely on after-the-fact "characterizations." There is no allegation that the screenshots of what he said were doctored.
Fair enough. He said he was “a racist” and another person in the administration said she was a “gatekeeper of white supremacy.” I was going by memory and mixed the two together in my head.
> These trends are hitting academia and the non-profit sector first. At my law school, one of the top ones in the country, the Dean got up and declared himself a “white supremacist” at a town hall meeting: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/northwestern-univers...
The only thing shown here is the fear of being ostracized, and the costs with being contrarian. You think this was contrition? I think it was simply them realizing they were better off lying than being genuine.
Maybe. None of the folks mentioned in the article are radicals—the interim Dean is a telecom lawyer and extremely average Midwestern dude. But the whole thing has a tone of “quasi-religious ritual” that gives me the creeps. (Also, as a “brown guy” I’d have been mortified to have had my professors get up and declare themselves "gatekeepers of white supremacy.")
I'm a former attorney. I left the profession after 13 years of practice and became a software developer.
I spent most of my career doing things like criminal defense and representing people with disabilities. In those areas of practice, things like CRT are badly needed. There can be no realistic dispute that the heavy hand of the law comes down more heavily on criminal defendants of color than it does those who are white - examination of the roots and causes of institutional racism are the best ways to combat this issue, and perhaps some discussion of these topics even in law school is warranted.
That said, I agree that most legal education is more practical and traditional than what is depicted in this article.
> There can be no realistic dispute that the heavy hand of the law comes down more heavily on criminal defendants of color than it does those who are white
There can be no realistic dispute that CRT has caused far more harm, division, and destruction for our society than it has benefited anyone. It is a cancerous ideology that needs to be excised.
No law experience, but this is what I had gathered as well. The examples in this article sound like cases of over-correction. Which isn’t great, but it’s probably better than the alternative of not recognizing the issues at all.
Same here (M&A/VC lawyer for nearly a decade). Agree 100% on all of the above.
I became skeptical right off the bat when she compared Boies' civil representation of Weinstein (at ostensibly $2,000+ per hour) to the defense attorneys who volunteered to represent Guantanamo detainees.
Most Americans would say that an American businessman has more of a right to effective legal counsel than foreign jihadists detained in Guantanamo. Once you start making the distinction between clients who have more or less of a right to effective legal counsel, you’ve already bought into the ideology complained of in the article.
I don't at all disagree that Weinstein has as much of a right to effective legal counsel as the rest of us.
I'm just pointing out the obvious: there's an enormous difference between (i) an indigent defendant's right to a public defender in a murder trial and (ii) the "right" to be represented in a civil suit by one of the most successful, famous and expensive lawyers in the country. The first is a constitutional right - the second is a market transaction (on both sides).
I think the point is that the quality of justice should not be a market transaction. To echo the GP's point, you accept it, most Americans accept it, but the people described in the article reject it. To them the best legal representation should go to the most vulnerable. Not the richest.
Sort of the opposite. The point I'm making (and the author misses) is that a business decision to make huge profits by representing a "bad guy" in society's eyes isn't remotely equivalent to a moral decision that even the worst (and poorest) offenders in our criminal justice system deserve to have a competent advocate on their side. The public defender is admirable precisely because he or she is driven by a belief in justice despite public criticism and low pay - not simply because it's a lucrative opportunity to generate profits.
Consider that Boies makes more in a (long) day working for Weinstein than some public defenders stand to make in a year. Boies has plenty of other clients he could work for and be paid lucratively - public defenders don't have the luxury of choosing their cases (and aren't in it for the money).
These folks want to upend the taboo that currently exists in the legal profession over judging other lawyers based on who they choose to represent. My point is that this sort of politicization of the profession doesn’t go down the road they think it does. There is no stable equilibrium where lawyers face social blowback for representing Weinstein or Catholic hospitals or Trump but are lauded for representing suspected terrorists and sex traffickers.
You're assuming they are all terrorists at Guantanamo, but it's known now that many of them are innocent randos who got swept up. You're also totally ignoring the difference between torture that violates international law and general human rights norms and getting prosecuted under the rule of law.
You seem to be doing pretty much doing exactly what the woke ppl do w/r/t men accused of sexual assault: you seem to want to decline to apply the protections of the law and its underlying ethical norms to people you don't like and disparage the notion they should have legal assistance.
You like falling back on majoritarian arguments when it suits you (at least twice in this thread, but I'm only partway through!). Are you in favor of abolishing the senate, then?
I'm using the majoritarian argument as a foil. The point is that if we start personally attacking lawyers for how other people feel about their clients, its the folks representing Gitmo detainees that are going to get the disproportionate share of the heat, not ones representing businessmen.
The future is here. It's just not distributed unevenly. Claiming that this is not common is not a valid argument in 2022. It will be common soon enough based on the trajectory of the last few years.
I disagree. You're assuming that these purported behaviors would inevitably spread. It's also possible that they're just occurring or being observed within a small group due to the specific incentives and dynamics for that group.
Maybe it's a fashionable research topic in that also gets web traffic but is otherwise far removed from the work of most legal practitioners.
But it doesn't establish the proportion of ppl with those beliefs. Radicals of any persuasion tend to be loudmouths.
You and I both went to T14s and clearly have different political beliefs from those people. Most people at such schools are pretty progressive, but not extreme, and will end up just working in biglaw and various government positions and as in-house counsel. Sadly for the woke, any attemp they make to obtain and exercise actual legal power by the same obnoxious behavior they exhibit in law school will not make a wrinkle in the stone face of the law. Only changes agreed-upon by less extreme elements can make it through--they need the votes.
Articles like this that are mostly based on a collection of one off examples always make me cautious. What do you think of the examples given? Are they extreme outliers, or common place in law schools?
Speaking just to the elite law school angle, her concerns are not illegitimate or unfounded, but they are blown out of proportion. Doing my best on phone; this isn't as thorough or nuanced as I'd like.
I myself was extremely irked that many of my progressive law school classmates were basically like Trump supporters in that they cared more about their desired policy goals and outcomes than the underpinnings of the law, and didn't have much of a value system beyond their ideologies. They would love to pack the courts with ideologues like conservatives have been fairly successful at doing.
But that was a minority of people. What's more, our professors were definitely not of the same mind. The prof I had for con law, for example, is a prominent, highly regarded young liberal intellectual who posed hypotheticals to challenge the class's liberal assumptions, chiding us with "you guys are good liberals right?" He also regularly attends FedSoc panels (the FedSoc chapter at Columbia is doing just fine btw).
She also simply fails to understand how unmoving and slow-to-change the law is. She presents it as much more fungible and modifiable than it is. Her pointing to Breyer re: preemptory challenges is dumb, and almost a counter-argument, given that Breyer is not a particularly ideological justice.
Weiss is an uncredentialed pseudo-intellectual who has latched onto a real problem, but who does not have the knowledge or experience to write competently on the subject.
This entire discussion is about the law and the legal system. For Weiss’ degree to be remotely relevant to this discussion she has to have a law degree from Columbia. She doesn’t. She graduated in 2007 with a BA.
Meanwhile the person you’re speaking to claims to have graduated recently from Columbia Law.
She didn't go to law school, she's not part of that world.
Think about how many articles get tech stuff wrong. Articles about law tend to be even worse because of the political/emotive aspects, which writers (such as here) try to inflame.
Thats was me. It is unconfirmed based on a third party website. Its so weird that despite her being a very well known public figure, that this info is not out there.
Neither she nor the actual author are lawyers. They don't know that world. They don't know the law. They aren't experienced in its operation. They've cherrypicked quotes and sutuations to depict a situation different from what's happening in the profession of law itself.
It seems impossible to find her actual degree anywhere. Its like it has been scrubbed from the internet. Do you know what she actually majored in? The best I could find was a BA in History but I am unsure as it came from a third party source.
Given that she worked for the WSJ and NYT and they most likely thoroughly vet their hires, I doubt she lied about having a degree from Columbia. If that is what you are implying.
"Weiss is an uncredentialed pseudo-intellectual who has latched onto a real problem, but who does not have the knowledge or experience to write competently on the subject."
I was simply trying to find out what she actually majored in to gauge whether there is any truth to this statement. Furthermore, the difficulty in finding the exact degree program seems very suspicious.
Its very strange that such a public figure has no record of her degree program anywhere on the internet. I can understand if she was a nobody but this person is famous enough to have a wikipedia page and many years of publications.
You're a fledgling first-year practitioner, with no direct access to the thoughts and business considerations of biglaw firm partners or what they deal with. And yet you confidently conclude that the article "is idiotic and so is most of this thread", as if your statement were fact, with not even a contrary opinion to support your statement.
Congratulations. You're the kind of junior lawyer the article warns against.
The business considerations have nothing to do with this.
The article makes claims about elite law schools and what the culture is like there. I was at one more recently than you. The article makes a logical leap to connect the increasing "wokeness" of young law students and lawyers to some alleged "takeover" of American law that is in no way manifesting itself. None of your comments substantiate the notion that such a takeover is eminent.
The "business considerations" of biglaw partners or my experience handling, e.g., commercial litigation, are irrelevant.
People really do hate the profession with an intensity that seems at times, as you said, idiotic.
I read these pieces about political disruptions to our system of laws with some concern that those deep in the thing might not understand the extent of their own biases. Better to err on the side of caution. A stitch in time saves nine.
I assume “her” refers to Bari Weiss whose Substack the article is published on. I also made the mistake of assuming that the article author was Bari Weiss so thanks for pointing it out. It looks like her Substack is more of a group blog with multiple authors contributing to it.
> I have practiced law for more than ten years, attended some of the institutions mentioned, and have worked in and with firms that would be considered "elite." I don't recognize any of the phenomena described in this article. Frankly the writer is either very far from the reality of modern legal practice (chasing noise in the system, without any real data) or she's viewing things selectively to serve some ideological purpose.
I am in a similar position as you. I have practiced for more than 10 years, and at one of the largest law firms (which will be kept anonymous), and I have forever been a full-time trial litigator. And I do not share your experience.
I've seen the exact opposite, i.e. as per what the article has described - 'woke' juniors coming in with ridiculous expectations, and being a bit too forward despite their lack of experience. I've seen resumes where applicants wrote that they preferred not to be hired at the firm if it didn't include the diversity policy of their choosing (and which is shameless, since a large firm has no ends of good applicants to select from), and where these applicants listed their own social activities (none of which included legally-relevant matters) with 'woke' topics as if that were of any inducement to a large legal firm that was billings-first, over virtue-signalling. I've seen some of these folks during meetings virtue signal and judge against other associates who they thought didn't reflect their standards, which was very toxic for the work environment as your political/social ideologies should really be kept out of the workplace. And so on.
If law firms are shaped by businesses, then the institutions producing these new students - and capitulating to these unrealistic 'woke' demands - are educating the new generation completely devoid of legal business reality.
But won't those people simply not rise through the ranks if they don't perform well? At the next step, how would they really "take over" the legal system just by being woke at work? They still have to make the same arguments the rest of us make in partnership disputes, proxy battles, sec lit, etc. Even by doing pro bono, best one can hope for is a good result for an individual, not systemic change. Most judges aren't woke. Going from A to Z here is rife with issues.
When there is a progressive version of FedSoc, then they might be poised to takeover the legal system. But for now, conservstives have taken it over by correctly identifying the power of the judiciary--the least accountable branch, btw.
Personally, I am fortunate to be at one of the least woke biglaw firms and nobody in my first year class is like that.
Sounds depressing, however an over-correction to real phenomena. A lot of young people come to the working world with unrealistic expectations that get realigned after time. It's part of growing up, saying/doing dumb things. Will it get worse or moderate? Time will tell.
Most major corporations demand that teams assigned to their legal matters have a certain % of minorities on them. You can literally be staffed on a matter solely because you are black or hispanic. If the law firm refuses or fails to hit the quota, the client will threaten to take their legal work elsewhere.
Most law firms run extensive diversity programs. If you bother to look into at all, it's obvious that black and hispanic applicants to law firms get a massive boost. This is on top of the massive LSAT bonus they get. Getting into a top 14 law school as a white guy requires being in the top 5% of the test scorers. For blacks and hispanics, it's more like top 20-30%. Same goes for law school grades and recruiting into law firms. So by the time a black guy gets hired at a top firm, they've had multiple, stacking advantages over white people.
As an associate at one of these elite firms, you will be dragged into diversity training where older associates boast about reporting people to HR for various microaggressions.
The vast vast majority of big law firms will refuse to approve pro bono work for socially conservative right wing causes. Nor will they allow you to represent a racist in their criminal or civil disputes. These same law firms will happily represent murderers and child molesters to try to get them out of jail (as they should, but they should represent the people with unpopular opinions too).
So if you're not seeing this stuff and noticing how crazy it is, it's probably because it's aligned with your politics and you don't mind.
It's really hard for me to tell how much of this stuff is real and how much is right-wing outrage trolling. I tend to assume that it's either totally made up, misinterpreted, or its influence is exaggerated.
I also tend to be skeptical of left-wing outrage fodder. We live in a media environment where outrage and stoking of controversy are king. Instead of "if it bleeds it leads," it's "if it offends it leads." It's this way because it gets clicks.
Agreed with ss108. Sure, there are a few law schools (among other higher education institutions) that have overreacted to "wokeness." But that plus a few anonymous accounts from (mostly junior) practicing attorneys doesn't at all mean that the movement has "taken over" America's legal system.
Consider that skilled developers might, on principle, prefer not to work at Facebook/Google or in the defense industry, etc. Maybe they just don't agree with the means and ends that a company uses to generate large profits (and salaries). So sure, a good attorney might prefer not to use his or her rare talents to support a business that gets paid millions of dollars to support/justify a cause/person/business/policy that the attorney doesn't personally agree with. Nothing wrong with that - and certainly not proof that the legal system (or tech industry) has been "taken over" by those who simply prefer to work at other firms with missions they believe in.
Hey, do you have contact info for an inquiry not related to this thread (but related to law and related to tech--legal tech, specifically)?
My Linkedin is already associated with my HN account (for better or worse, probably the latter), so I'll post the link below and you can contact me on there if that's convenient and you're interested:
Why are you attacking the author’s character rather than refuting the author’s words? Seems like a dishonest way to undermine another person’s opinion.
Because I do not work in the legal field so I can't verify whether what she's claiming is true or widespread. But I can evaluate her other actions actions and statements and from there extrapolate that this is likely a fabrication or an occurrence far outside the norm that reaffirms her biases so she's amplifying it.
The writer, as far as I can tell, was an unassuming center-left liberal, until something happened while she was at NYT, and now she is on a crusade against the forces who did that something to her.
She reminds me of those anticommunists you used to see from Eastern Europe. They wouldn't ordinarily be conservatives, but, after experiencing the Soviets, everything changes; for them, all the threats now seem to come from the left.
I can't really blame them.
You're right that she's a little one-note at this point, though.
(Correction: I thought this was written by Bari Weiss, but the author is Aaron Sibarium. The latter, I am unfamiliar with.)
The most rabid anti-smokers are ex-smokers, and the strongest pacifists are army veterans.
We tend to absorb much of our values and tenets from families and environment, in a relatively uncritical way; hence, they are fundamentally weak, and often doctrinaire. When, instead, we reach certain conclusions individually, on the back of our personal experience, they become practically unassailable, because "my experiences are unquestionably real, and my brain cannot be wrong". This can be a good thing, but can also fog one's vision for good.
She was never anything but this. She only wants free speech for those who agree with her. She tried to get a professor fired for supporting Palestinian human rights while she was in college, and then has the nerve to say that individuals voluntarily refusing to associate with people who express views they find repugnant are really the ones who are doing illiberal censorship.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but why is everyone calling the author "she"? The byline shows the author as "Aaron Sibarium." I don't want to offend, since maybe Aaron goes by the "she" pronoun, but it's a weird assumption to make even in 2022.
An important thing to bear in mind is that the legal profession is largely self-regulated, and lawyers have a monopoly over the legal system. State bars and bar organizations are largely unaccountable to the public. If these organizations abandon principles of neutrality and objectivity, and become overtly ideological, they can use their power over lawyers to exert tremendous, anti-democratic influence over every aspect of life. Everyone should be worried about this.
And when I say everyone, I mean it. People assume that it's just "conservatives" complaining about these ideological changes. But to be clear, all of the people quoted in this article--like the overwhelming majority of lawyers--are liberals: David Boies, Andy Koppelman, Nadine Strossen, etc. Indeed, they're probably well to the left of your average Democrat.
Also, when it comes to the legal system, you shouldn't disregard complaints from "conservatives." The reason legal process works is because, even though it results in winners and losers, everyone at least everyone agrees in the process and the principles underlying it. The faith Americans have in the legal system is remarkable given that 90% of lawyers are liberal Democrats, while most Americans are Republicans or conservative Democrats. (Fun fact: about two-thirds of the country still opposes the half-century old Supreme Court precedent banning school prayer.) Abandoning the dedication to neutrality and objectivity that has been championed by even liberal legal organizations up to this point will have profoundly negative consequences for the rule of law.
Likewise, most lawyers are liberal on criminal justice issues. Meanwhile, a 2014 Sentencing Project study found that two-thirds of Black people (90% of whom vote Democrat) think the criminal justice system "is not harsh enough." https://news.wttw.com/2019/04/11/how-black-leaders-unintenti...
Most lawyer's support Roe v. Wade's rule that states cannot prohibit abortions before fetal viability (around the end of the second trimester). But 65% of people think abortion should "usually be illegal in the second trimester" (i.e. after 13 weeks): https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort...
Most lawyers are aggressively secular, and lean toward a mode of excluding religion from schools similar to France. Meanwhile, most Americans say that religion has too little presence in schools: https://news.gallup.com/poll/18136/public-favors-voluntary-p.... Specifically, 73% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats think there is too little religion in schools.
Insofar as judges (and Supreme Court Justices) come from the pool of lawyers, it's important to observe that lawyers as a group are well to the left of not only Republicans, but many or most Democrats on these issues.
Have you considered that maybe it's not the lawyers that are out of step with the American people, but that maybe the American people are out of step with how to effectively conduct a democracy?
For example, lawyers should be aggressively secular. The separation of church and state is one of the most important pillars of a fair democracy, and should be steadfastly defended by our legal professionals regardless of the current ebbs and flows of culture and religion.
Personally, I think that the Reagan Era ushered in a wave of cultural conservatism that is far out of step with a healthy democracy, and lead to a toxic abundance of corporatism, deregulation, and rugged individualism, and that the "woke wave" that conservatives complain about is in many ways really just a cultural pendulum swing back to a healthy center.
Democrats are to the right of most lawyers, sure - but the Democratic party would be considered right wing in most other western democracies. America is so right-leaning that being a centrist in a global sense makes you more to the left than our left wing party.
So I don't think this data shows that our legal system is being corrupted by a sudden surge of radical leftists. I think it shows that American culture is going off the deep end and that our lawyers are trying to keep us tethered to the realities of democracy. These people get decades of education about the concrete function of legal institutions, and undoubtedly know much more about what is actually effective than your average American that just spews their untested opinion at a polster.
> but that maybe the American people are out of step with how to effectively conduct a democracy?
I'm a believer in procedural democracy. Within limits--with those limits themselves having public endorsement--democracy means that people should have the kind of society the people want. I don't think the only kind of democracy is secular, liberal democracy: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/de....
> Democrats are to the right of most lawyers, sure - but the Democratic party would be considered right wing in most other western democracies. America is so right-leaning that being a centrist in a global sense makes you more to the left than our left wing party.
On economic issues yes, but not on social and cultural issues. France is to the right of America on each of the issues I listed above except public religion. For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks). On color blindness versus race consciousness, centrist Macron is far to the right of American progressives: https://wset.com/news/nation-world/france-denounces-american.... Macron, in fact, has specifically attacked "woke" progressive ideology.
The only exception is religion--France is aggressively secular. But France is the exception on that front. For example, the UK still technically requires all schools to have daily prayers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom. That law would be unconstitutional in the U.S. Likewise, public funding for religious schooling, which is common in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc., would be unconstitutional in the U.S. In another example, in Bavaria it is mandatory to display a cross on public buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzpflicht. By contrast, in the U.S. there was a big kerfuffle recently about whether it was permissible to have a cross sculpture on public property.
> I think that the Reagan Era ushered in a wave of cultural conservatism that is far out of step with a healthy democracy
I think you have to separate two things. First, how culturally conservative are the people? Second, how responsive is the legal system to those views?
America has always been extremely religious, like all the other New World countries. The percentage of Americans who pray daily is comparable to Iran. And as a practical matter, the religiosity of Americans is continually replenished by immigration. Folks who come here from Latin America, Asia, etc., may vote Democrat, but often they're quite culturally conservative.
Reagan didn't make America culturally conservative--he made the legal system more responsive to people's cultural conservatism. During a period in the mid-20th century, lawyers--who represent an elite slice of society--had departed quite significantly from the moral center of the country, and Reagan turned that back.
The interesting thing when you compare to Europe is that the legal system in those countries is much more responsive to the public on issues of morality than the U.S. legal system. Social change happens in those countries through popular legislation, not court rulings. For example, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously found that the express "right to marriage" contained in the European Convention on Human Rights did not extend to same-sex marriage. They did that the year after the U.S. Supreme Court reached the exact opposite conclusion about the U.S. Constitution's implied marriage right. (Countries less religious than the U.S., such as Italy, Greece, and Switzerland, still don't have same-sex marriage as of 2022.) Likewise, European courts have consistently deferred to legislatures on issues such as abortion laws.
The U.S. may often seem very conservative because the U.S. is much more like Poland than Denmark. But the legal system is actually aggressively liberal in overruling public opinion compared to the counterparts in Europe. Frankly, they remind me a little of Bangladesh, my home country. There, the country's elites have consistently tried to overrule the deeply-Islamic public in making secularism a central legal principle.
>> On economic issues yes, but not on social and cultural issues. France is to the right of America on each of the issues I listed above except public religion. For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks). On color blindness versus race consciousness, centrist Macron is far to the right of American progressives: https://wset.com/news/nation-world/france-denounces-american.... Macron, in fact, has specifically attacked "woke" progressive ideology.
>> The only exception is religion--France is aggressively secular. But France is the exception on that front. For example, the UK still technically requires all schools to have daily prayers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer#United_Kingdom. That law would be unconstitutional in the U.S. Likewise, public funding for religious schooling, which is common in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, etc., would be unconstitutional in the U.S. In another example, in Bavaria it is mandatory to display a cross on public buildings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreuzpflicht. By contrast, in the U.S. there was a big kerfuffle recently about whether it was permissible to have a cross sculpture on public property.
THANK YOU. It's so refreshing to actually see someone not treat leftism-rightism as a monolithic thing measured via free healthcare.
As far as I'm concerned, leftism and rightism are best understood as inchoate moral intuitions that are given form in things like culture, philosophy and various creeds, and those creeds frequently contradict each other. The world wished for by a postliberal paleocon and a libertarian transhumanist couldn't be more different, yet both are ostensibly on the right. Woke intersectionalists and TERFs literally run different patches of the same ideology, both solidly on the left, and are for all practical purposes at war, and the list goes on and on.
Treating them as monoliths is not always useful.
> For example, France's abortion law (which generally bars abortions after 14 weeks) would not survive under Roe (which requires abortion to be generally available up to viability, which is 22-24 weeks).
Similar thing in the Nordic country where I live: People are very pro-choice in terms of having abortion be available and an okay choice to make, but understand that abortion is a grave matter and the law reflects it, something that'd likely look really weird to Americans.
> "The majority of Donald Trump supporters are women and people of color"
Interesting semantic game. I had to stop and think for a second, but, yes, that is probably literally true (albeit just barely).
Of white Trump voters, probably a little under half are women.
Some of-color people (that semantic boundary is itself flexible) also voted for Trump, probably enough to make up for whatever man/woman difference there was among the white voters, plus enough to get over the 50% threshold.
So yes, literally, "the majority of Donald Trump's voters in 2016 and 2020 were women and people of color" is probably true.
Scott Alexander pointed out on his old blog that compared to other recent Republican candidates (Romney and McCain), Trump performed about the same among white voters and over-performed among non-white voters. The notion of Trump as the "white man's candidate" is mostly BS.
> Then, an associate in her late twenties stood up. She said there were lawyers at the firm who were “uncomfortable” with Boies representing disgraced movie maker Harvey Weinstein, and she wanted to know whether Boies would pay them severance so they could quit and focus on applying for jobs at other firms.
This is an odd hill to die on, especially for an attorney who knows how the US legal system works. Everyone, no matter how despicable, is entitled to legal representation.
You see a similar "code" in medicine. For instance, when the Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested by SWAT, he was taken to the hospital and treated by doctors for his wounds. The medical staff wouldn't even think of objecting to treating a known terrorist, because their duty is to be physicians.
This is eroding also. For example, Kathy Hochul ordered that priority be given to patients of "Non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity" when seeking certain covid therapies, citing "longstanding systemic health and social
inequities." The framework operates on a points system, and that affords a point.
That document is talking about triaging when there is a shortage of monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals so they can't treat everyone. The goal then is to try to minimize the number of people whose COVID progresses to severe COVID.
Like it or not the fact is that race and ethnicity is in fact a decent indicator of probability that someone's case will progress to severe COVID.
Maybe that is due to "longstanding systemic health and social inequities" or maybe it is due to something else but the why doesn't really matter from a triaging point of view. From a triaging point of view it is not much different than obesity or age or any other observable characteristic or attribute of the patient that experience has shown correlates with outcomes.
Men are significantly more at risk of severe covid than women, if they actually cared about the risk of different demographics they would have also prioritized males. Applying a set of ideals in just the situations that suits you is called hypocrisy.
You left out that those inequities "have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19" which is accurate according to the CDC.
> Race and ethnicity are risk markers for other underlying conditions that affect health, including socioeconomic status, access to health care, and exposure to the virus related to occupation, e.g., frontline, essential, and critical infrastructure workers.
So the white people who have poor socioeconomic status, access to health care or are exposed as front-line workers are just out of luck, eh?
Maybe we can extend her logic like depending on one's standing in society their treatment priority will be reversed. So governor as first citizen of the state would be last person to be treated for ailments and so on.
Fat chance of that ever happening. American politicians have shown time and time again they think they're above us rubes. (See ACA exemptions, the lack of effective insider trading laws, 21% pay increases for them and their staff this year, etc).
> he was taken to the hospital and treated by doctors for his wounds. The medical staff wouldn't even think of objecting to treating a known terrorist, because their duty is to be physicians.
They are the only institution that came out of that looking like anything other than a bunch of idiots.
Feds? Dropped the ball and engaged in witch hunt to make up for it.
Staties? Dropped the ball, endangered the public and violated civil rights left and right.
That circles back to the question of Weinstein reputation.
Is a lawyer who has liberty to reject a client because the client can't afford the lawyer's billable hours also at liberty to reject a client because damage to the lawyer's reputation for representing that client is factored into the cost of doing business?
"Representing you will actively damage my future business, so you can't afford me" seems like a consistent position a lawyer could take on why a client must seek representation elsewhere.
And I am suggesting in a moral universe, legal talent would be rationed by the merit of the case, rather than the wealth of the payer.
The most talented lawyers would say "I don't take cases from scumbags like you. Find yourself one of the lower tiered lawyers.". Instead of saying "I work for whoever has the most money."
A better answer to the, "‘How can you represent someone who’s guilty?’ question is that defense lawyers defend the integrity of the legal system and process against the people who have found themselves in government because the sovereignty of the process is what the rule of law means.
However, the process of litigation is not the representation or discovery of truth, it means currying the favor of a judge or jury - which is what makes current critical theories of social justice so pernicious, because they are also based on this "throw everything at it and see what sticks," approach to political power. Students coming out of schools appear to not be educated as stewards of truth and culture, but as raiders and looters of it.
If you have ever found yourself in opposition to someone using political complaints, they also often litigate in the same way, where you may not have even done something objectively wrong, but you have let yourself become exposed to someone leveraging a taboo against you the way that prosecutors can choose to lever laws, and it doesn't have to be true, if you have something they want (or don't want) there are no conseqeunces to lying or misrepresenting facts in the course of social justice. The judge and jury today is social media and this ubiquitous "narrative," where participants trade in slanders.
Part of this ideology is that "muh freedom," e.g. limits to state power and accountability to principle, only deprives marginalized people of complete power to wield justice if/when they seize the reins of it, but it is supported by another intellectual solvent of subjectivity that means there is no objective truth, only appeals to power and consequences.
These are the factors that made their way out of the courts, into the culture, and are now making their way back into the courts as a zombie freak ideology where there is no truth or meaning in language, and sadly I don't see the centre holding.
If the client has told his lawyer that s/he is guilty, the lawyer is very ethically and legally constrained. They are not allowed to present evidence to the court that they know is false ... which includes not calling a defendant to testify on the stand if the lawyer knows that the defendant is going to lie. The lawyer is basically limited to making the prosecution prove their case.
If you believe that the system of law is just and fair, then you can give your full effort to defending them. If they are guilty (whether they tell you or not) then the system will find them as such. That's the theory anyway.
Now in practice, you would probably have to tell them their best chance is to make a deal (like 80% or so of all cases anyways). This generally benefits the courts (volume is too high to process), the prosecutors (guaranteed win), and the defendant (lesser sentence).
You might even think that the rules/laws are wrong or are not just. This shouldn't interfere with the idea that everyone gets a trial under those rules. If this is case, then it might be a good idea to get out of that line of work.
Also, there is a big difference between not wanting to work at a firm that represented someone and not taking on a case personally. You can personally say you don't want a case for some reasons (like not being able to do a good job), but if you're saying that nobody should represent them, that's an affront the the principles of your profession.
You represent them to the best of your ability or you get out of the profession.
That's part of being a lawyer in the American legal system and if you can't deal with that then you shouldn't be one.
This echos of some of the "doctors" during COVID who declared they'd rather let unvaccinated people die than treat them. Granted, most of them were probably saying this for attention and twitter points but it's still an amazing declaration to make.
Well, you can decline a case if you think it's not possible for you to do a good job on it. Arguably this could include a hatred for someone. If the person negarively affected you or your family with the crime, then ethics may even dictate that you can't represent them.
Although I do agree this scenario of quitting a firm because the firm represented someone is a stark departure from these traditional exceptions. I get that people don't want to work for a company that does morally wrong stuff, but I don't think providing a defense should fit that. The whole concept of the system is that it should be a fair fight under the rules of law/procedure. It's almost like they're saying that they think the rules aren't fair, but that they would rather not afford people their due protection than try to correct the actual injustices in ehe system.
You're misquoting. It is "presumed innocent". Most criminal defendants are guilty of the crime for which they are charged.
I think it can be really hard on lawyers at times. Society really frowns upon a criminal defense attorney's representation of a rapist, and of course their opinion isn't changed when the defendant is found factually innocent at trial.
The USA has a legal system wherein even a guilty murderer can walk free if the police used unconstitutional means to gather the evidence against them. This system was put in place by judges (not by legislators) simply because they were sick of police and prosecutors using these unethical methods to convict, and then there was no investigation or misconduct charges against them.
Majority of convictions are plea deals, because trial penalty is just too large. And it is pretty much impossible to overturn existing convicion on anything but technical process mistake - no matter how convincing new evidence of innocense is.
While guilty murderer can walk, courts are also super eager to accept shoddy "scientific" evidence. And being defense layer is also worst for your career the being prosecutor. So, I am not sure it is as rosy as you make it sound.
One gestalt impression I'm getting from the parts about "burn the place down" is that the economic precaritization of the professions has produced a mass cohort of young professionals who seriously don't care about the institutions they staff and the social purpose of those institutions. They see themselves as something of a generational social movement instead, taking over and coopting institutions they view as offering them a mostly adversarial social contract to begin with.
> They see themselves as something of a generational social movement instead, taking over and coopting institutions they view as offering them a mostly adversarial social contract to begin with.
Thanks for pointing this out. Don’t really care for the OP or most of the discussion, but I think this observation is really something to think on.
I’m not part of law so I can’t relate to that topic, but I can apply this pattern to most institutions (or markets) I’ve interacted with:
* healthcare market (movement to socialize)
* big tech institutions (lots of younger techies support unions, blatantly hate on their big tech employers, etc)
* housing market (upzone or socialize housing are popular topics)
* university (everyone wants the student loan status quo to change, the elite school status quo is garbage too)
>* big tech institutions (lots of younger techies support unions, blatantly hate on their big tech employers, etc)
The mindfuck for me is (we have these types in academia too) how they rack up a thousand and one political aspirations other than better wages and working conditions, before ever actually achieving a legally recognized union that can bargain a contract.
Our current "unionization effort" at my job has stances on dormitory construction, affordable housing, at least two theaters of foreign policy, COVID policy, racial justice, gender justice, and other issues. Also it gave up trying to obtain a formal union election and a contract from 2017-2021 because Trump was staffing the NLRB with the wrong people. Now under Biden we're "trying" to unionize again, but it seems to be the second year of the effort and everyone's still taking "solidarity stances" while conducting "trainings" for how to go and get people to actually sign union cards.
I signed my freaking card in 2018 and de facto they've done everything except fight for our interests as workers. I think that terms like "social justice" are often far too vague for useful discussion, but I've started thinking the vagueness is the point. "Social justice" seems to provide a useful way of melting down many different causes and different constituencies into a nondescript stew from which activists can spoon themselves "campaigns" to work on, without any accountability for having to win something concrete.
Articles like this push a narrative of woke social justice warriors ruining society by ignoring customs and norms. Certainly there are exploitationists who gravitate to any movement to attain power. However, everyone who tries to affect change in bureaucratic organizations knows that the worst things are not the word ‘no’ but complete silence. Customs and norms allow institutions an excuse continue the status quo without thinking too hard about it.
The real story here is that institutions have gained so much power in society such that they have eclipsed every function in daily human life. The people who lead them have arbitrary and capricious control over prices, investment, transportation, and justice. The way people have responded to this is just part of the story. I want journalists to report on the whole story.
I explained that badly. The people who compose bureaucratic institutions are silent. Going neutral, not taking a stance, no comments, are the safe moves, and produce no change either good or bad. Depriving institutions of neutrality is a way to erode their power. This is a tool activists have.
>The real story here is that institutions have gained so much power in society such that they have eclipsed every function in daily human life. The people who lead them have arbitrary and capricious control over prices, investment, transportation, and justice. The way people have responded to this is just part of the story. I want journalists to report on the whole story.
Very true. The question is not why left-wing college grads can wield arbitrary personal power based on some job they got at a prestigious private institution. The question is why jobs at prestigious but still ultimately private, undemocratic, unaccountable institutions have so much arbitrary power in the first place.
And IMHO the answer to that involves a lot of talk about how stupid, untrustworthy, self-serving, racist, corrupt, etc the actual voting public supposedly is.
> And IMHO the answer to that involves a lot of talk about how stupid, untrustworthy, self-serving, racist, corrupt, etc the actual voting public supposedly is.
And said as though the left-wing college grads are completely immune to being stupid, untrustworthy, self-serving, racist, corrupt, etc. (OK, they may be less racist. It's a start. The rest still applies, though.)
No, left-wing college graduates are not less racist. I can assure you of that from direct, first-hand experience. They just think that, being college graduates (particularly from humanities fields, not like your smelly racist STEM worker-bee degree, you're just a servant while they're a master), they get to redefine what racism means. If you are a racial or ethnic minority, prepare for these motherfuckers to re-narrate your entire history and identity to you as a just-so story to explain the stance the Third World Liberation Front or whoever took on you in 1968, that then got institutionalized into the humanities courses these people took, which were then brought out into street militancy from 2014-2020.
> If you are a racial or ethnic minority, prepare for these motherfuckers to re-narrate your entire history and identity to you as a just-so story
That hit painfully close to home. I once said I liked the speech George Bush gave about Islam after 9/11–based on being a brown guy after 9/11–and was confronted by a white woman who told me I should “educate” myself on how “Islamophobia had damaged Black and brown people in America.” (She was, of course, “too tired” to educate me herself.)
But not too tired to confront you. And not to tired to be condescending or smugly superior.
I like to think I'm a good driver, but sometimes I am (let us say) rather relaxed about strictly following the stripes on the road. My wife sometimes says how tiring it is trying to keep the car on the road when you don't have a steering wheel. Well, people like this lady you ran into must find it exhausting trying to keep the culture on the path of righteousness when all they have is nagging.
For a job, the scope of responsibility should match the scope of authority, or it's very frustrating. The scope of their authority very much does not match the scope of their self-appointed responsibility. One would wish that the frustration would lead them to question whether they really should take on that self-appointed responsibility, but many won't...
The concept that there exist "brown people" (read: MENA or South Asians, I'm guessing?) who aren't Muslim and have serious concerns about political Islamism is gonna blow that lady's fucking mind.
Like, guess who really hates Daesh/ISIS? Middle Easterners. You haven't seen someone hate ISIS until you've seen Syrian refugees hate ISIS.
This article is describing what happens when an institution starts to lose trust. There's a perception, even by participants in the system, that the system results in too many wrongful convictions and too many wrongful acquittals.
That's a problem that should be talked about and addressed, but blaming people who are knowledgable about the system (licensed attorneys) for a changing set of values due to reduced trust in the system is silly. If a system is consistently producing outcomes that are different from its value, the system is broken, and it people are going to rationally lost faith in its old customs.
>If a system is consistently producing outcomes that are different from its value, the system is broken, and it people are going to rationally lost faith in its old customs.
Except the evidence that these ideologues cite for this divergence from values is inequality of outcome, which is a ridiculous metric to gauge the fairness of a system which presides over a culturally and genetically heterogeneous population. And that's the key issue with so called CRT, which has become somewhat of an umbrella term both for directly influenced pedagogy and ideologies with underpinnings which are simply similar to CRT in spirit: when you naively presume that all peoples are identical in ability and behavior, save for influences of the economic and justice systems (i.e. ignoring culture and genes), then naturally the only allowable answer to the question of inequity is discriminatory injustice. And the outcome of such shortsightedness is broken, often reverse racist policy, which is exceedingly quick to make excuses for suspects of the "right" (minority) demographic and particularly harsh on suspects of the "wrong" ("privileged") demographic.
This is ultimately an overcorrection to the injustices of slavery/jim crow and WWII-era nazism - we've taken race and cultural blindness a step too far, conflating equal treatment under the law with equal outcome under the law (and in other institutions as well). If your ideology does not allow for differences in average behavior/ability/values as an explanation for different average outcomes then it becomes trivially easy to see the boogeyman of racism/sexism across institutions and justify what amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Again my point was that the only justification that these ideologues have for attacking equal treatment under the law is the "evidence" of unequal outcome by demographic. That and a healthy amount of cherry picking, like exaggerating the implications of 19 unarmed black male deaths in 2019 in a country of 300MM+. Unfortunately the standard for evidence in soft sciences is not particularly rigorous.
I'm explicitly saying that discrimination is not the only cause for the multimodal distribution of outcomes, and that in a perfectly demographic blind justice system you would still see such statistical groupings, assuming all people were treated equally before the law.
To believe that, you'd need to start with evidence of at least one demographically blind system that resulted in significantly disparate outcomes amongst otherwise equal classes.
But such evidence would point to the system not being demographically blind.
The by far strongest factor for getting harsh sentences is being male. Not being black, it is being a man. Yet CRT still considers male a privileged attribute, so obviously we can conclude that men getting harsher sentences than women is fair according to them, which satisfies your condition that fair trials can result in disparage outcomes.
If you disagree then you disagree with CRT, meaning we don't have to convince you that CRT is bad, you already agree with us.
There exists a disparity between men and women when it comes to sentencing.
There exists a disparity between black men and white men when it comes to sentencing, and a disparity between black women and white women.
So while yes, gender is a variable in outcomes, race is an additional variable, that's constant between genders.
The "what about gender!?" argument against CRT is just what-aboutalism that addresses neither issue.
But it's a funny one in that it acknowledges the core complaint of CRT (a facially neutral system can result in discrimination based on secondary characteristics evidenced by outcomes) while shifting the characteristic that is being discriminated against.
If only there was some field of study or theory that considered the intersection of these characteristics and how they can overlap and impact outcomes.
>There exists a disparity between men and women when it comes to sentencing
There exists a disparity between men and women when it comes to behavior, which is reflected in sentencing. This is the key component that people are unwilling to acknowledge because they have been conditioned to express a visceral reaction to anything remotely appearing to suggest differences in behavior/decisionmaking among demographics. Which, again, leads us to the invalid assertion that all differences in outcome are born of unequal treatment; invalid because the other half of the answer is socially taboo.
No, my argument is that outcomes are worse for some subsets of black people because they are more likely to make decisions which put them in conflict with the legal system. Which is an objective, statistically supported fact, and even if you want to shift to poverty as a scapegoat, that still is primarily expressed through culture and ultimately up to the individual to change.
"Deserve" is a loaded term, a moral judgement and has no actual bearing on this argument. And let's also acknowledge that not all blacks in the US have these problems, Nigerian immigrants are one of the most successful demographics in the country by all measures, despite the supposed abundance of racism holding all other African Americans back.
You can restate your argument however you'd like, but my summary holds.
That the Nigerian Diaspora is relatively successful, especially when compared to the native population isn't shocking when we remember that most "legal" immigrant communities are more successful than the native population.
That disparity generally disappears by the third or fourth generation.
Turns out the process of immigration is a fairly good self-selection process [0].
But, the differences between immigrant groups has a racial component too.
I've not done enough in depth reading on the disparity (mostly summaries from other people I vaguely remember), but I do often think about Gladwell's piece "Black like them" [1] when the topic comes up.
You asked about disparage outcomes in a fair system, I gave it to you. It is on topic. Both CRT advocates and opponents considers it fair that men gets harsher sentences.
CRT does not claim that disparate outcomes based on gender are "fair".
It explicitly acknowledges gender as an intersecting variable.
The idea disparate outcomes between genders are "fair" isn't supported logically or evidentially, especially when we consider misdemeanor crimes without a component of violence.
> The idea disparate outcomes between genders are "fair" isn't supported logically or evidentially
Can you link to a prominent CRT advocate speaking up about white men getting harsher sentences than black women? Otherwise I don't believe you when you say they don't consider this fair. The times I have argued about this they always start bringing up culture or genes to explain the differences, never that men are less privileged under these circumstances.
So they say, them saying it doesn't mean it is actually true though.
> You seem to want to discredit CRT based not on its actual academic discussion
You were free to link an academic discussion where they pointed out these things, but you didn't. Nothing comes up when I try to google for it, hence I'll conclude it doesn't exist.
Edit: The problem with these discussions is that you use the ideals for your own things and the actual implementations for others. Take meritocracy for example, meritocracy is inherently anti-racist but in practice it might be racist. So when you see someone argue pro meritocracy you see them as probably racists or at least not anti-racist. Similarly when I see someone argue for CRT I don't see all the things they say CRT to be, but what it is in practice. Ultimately you can't hide behind theoretical definitions, trying to practice meritocracy leads to some problems and we should acknowledge that, similarly the CRT we see in practice also has lots of problems we should acknowledge.
Your edit is basically "You're arguing what CRT actually is and means but I wanna argue about what I think CRT is based on the narrow set of sources I personally interact with."
I can't prove that something doesn't exist, no. You have to prove that it does exist.
Hence you can't just say that I need to read more, I have read enough that I know the topic isn't something they care about so it is basically absent everywhere. If they actually do care about it I would like to read the book or study, I have searched a lot for them but they don't seem to exist.
And you can't say that the topic is so obscure that it wouldn't be covered anywhere. The rate at which men get shot by police and get put into prison more is one of the highest and most notable disparage effects any demographic faces, black people are twice as likely to get shot as white people, but men are 20 times as likely to get shot as women. If they really cared about those things then this would be covered in every introductory book to the subject, yet I fail to find even a single one who even brings it up as a footnote.
I'd be fine with CRT if it was practiced properly, but everything I've seen of it tells me it isn't practiced properly. That is what happens when you call everyone who criticises it racists or similar, then you don't listen to feedback and the field gets corrupted.
"I'd be fine with CRT if practiced properly is" is a weird statement.
It's a critical academic framework. "Practiced properly" it's something academics debate. There is no "proper practice" beyond applying the generalized methodology by examining outcomes and asking whether they're the result of bias.
Based on this thread, my assumption is, despite your rather vocal criticism of CRT, you haven't read any scholarly works on the topic and have only a passing understanding based on pop-culture exposure.
I'm not here to provide you a free education, but literally all of the foundational works by Bell, Crenshaw, Guinier, et. al. cover intersectional as a component of their criticism.
Please explain the different outcomes between second gen African immigrants and American whites. Under your theory every demographic is obligated to want and behave the same as any other. Smart women choosing medicine instead of electrical engineering is prima facie evidence to you some kind of discrimination happened.
My point wasn't "any difference in outcome is the result of discrimination" it was explicitly "you cannot use the difference in outcome as evidence there should be a difference in outcome."
The other commenter wrote that is black people commit more murders then it isn't surprising to see more black people in prison for murder. That's not circular, that's an expected outcome.
Are you simply unwilling to acknowledge any (subjectively) negative differences between cultures? Does culture influence decisionmaking or not? Is respect for law and academic achievement not a cultural trait? This is such a trivially obvious argument if you are willing to move past the irrational taboo that relegates us to pretending that culture can only vary positively. Does culture influence behavior and decisionmaking or not?
Right, all those inner city murders in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods are being committed by white supremacists from out of town.
Don't you think you're reaching a little? Or do you honestly mean to imply that whites commit just as much murder per capita, but are simply 10x more likely to avoid arrest and conviction, because racism?
The disparity is so wide that we know with 100% confidence the black murder rate is a decent multiple of the white rate. Murder is relatively easy to track since there is a body
That the authors of the paper included that statistic, based on the exact same data set you linked, without acknowledging that their own paper is arguing there is a massive disparity in wrongful conviction rates and thus FBI data set is, I believe, a benign mistake by the author.
We do not have a good understanding of the violence incidence rate amongst Black Americans (or any demographic). We do have a precise understanding of victimization across demographics.
But, even if you just assume that any wrongfully convicted Black American would be replaced by a different Black offender, you still have to deal with the disparity in wrongful convictions and its implications in terms of criminal justice and race.
That you managed to skim that paper and find the one already established statistic from the same flawed data set, without considering those implications is unsurprising.
>We do not have a good understanding of the violence incidence rate amongst Black Americans (or any demographic). We do have a precise understanding of victimization across demographics.
You are bending over backwards to deny the fact that black men are killing black men in black communities in significantly higher numbers than any other group. No amount of false convictions erases this fact, the bodies are hard to miss. That alone indicates a cause other than discrimination in the legal system.
I'm not denying that fact. I'm debating the precision of the statistic, and pointing towards other evidenced disparities that are not directly related to the murder rate.
You seem to be bending over backward to skim past those, focusing on a single statistic that allows you to push a simplistic, prejudiced narrative.
Even if the murder rate disparities are 100% accurate, that does not explain or justify any of the other disparities we see in evidence.
The number of black people in prison would PLUMMET if they didn’t commit crimes. Same for every race. Makes it hard to give a shit. You are obviously right that innocent people are in prison and I’m right the black murder rate is high
It's not circular at all. Rephrased and generalized: "If more people end up in jail, because people are committing more crimes, it's not ____."
Now add race: "If more black people end up in jail, because blacks are committing more crimes, it's not discrimination towards blacks, but discrimination towards crimes".
But yes, to your point, you can't judge solely based on how many are in jail, that they must be committing more crimes... because the justice system isn't perfect, and innocents do end up in jail. But again, to the other's points, it's entirely in the realm of possibility that black people are in fact committing more crimes, and hence there should be disproportionately more of them in jail. As to whether that's actually the case, is not easy to say.
Culture is your value system, your sense of right and wrong, just and unjust, fair and unfair, it encapsulates aspirations, defines self-actualization...if certain subcultures see clout in prison time, for a example, how could you possibly expect such a demographic to produce the same per capita number of convicts as a demographic which shuns law breaking?
And then genes have direct (e.g. warrior gene, brain structure) and indirect (e.g. hormone concentrations/sensitivity) influences on behavior and decision making. In addition to the heritability of intelligence which is going to influence both propensity for law breaking and conviction rate.
You can't celebrate diversity while only pretending that demographic differences are positive (itself a culturally subjective measure). That's a recipe for cross-demographic resentment and suboptimal legal and social outcomes, as we're increasingly seeing with this new generation of up and coming ideologues across our institutions.
People see sentiment like this and recoil in horror as though it justifies racism against individuals; on the contrary, these differences are merely shifts in normal-like distributions, i.e. we should still treat individuals equally in law and industry, but we must acknowledge that there will be average differences in outcome across demographics if we want a society based on equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome can only be achieved by handicapping the competent individuals that we rely on for progress of technology and civilization.
Despite what you may have heard, reality does not have a liberal bias, it unfortunately has a racial bias, because of the nature of evolution. Thousands of generations of adaptation to vastly different geographies has left it's mark, and denying this truth, while well intentioned, is dangerously misguided.
Do people actually agree with the intro to this piece:
> If you are a Common Sense reader, you are by now highly aware of the phenomenon of institutional capture. From the start, we have covered the ongoing saga of how America’s most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology—and have come to betray their own missions.
> Medicine. Hollywood. Education. The reason we exist is because of the takeover of newspapers like The New York Times.
> Ok, so we’ve lost a lot. A whole lot. But at least we haven’t lost the law. That’s how we comforted ourselves. The law would be the bulwark against this nonsense. The rest we could work on building anew.
> But what if the country’s legal system was changing just like everything else?
Feels like it's kind of pointless to talk about the article and try to have a conversation between individuals who believe this and individuals who think that all sounds like a wild conspiracy theory.
Hollywood has betrayed its mission? And you click through and it says Hollywood used to be a 'boys club', by which I guess they mean full of sexual predators who were above the law? But now it's lost its way?
The clash of worldviews makes any opinions on specific items almost irrelevant.
I remember checking out Common Sense once, and it quickly became apparent that it was a conservative reactionary paranoia engine and not a platform for intelligent discussion.
If you want a conservative anti-"woke" angle on things, The Weekly Dish and Matt Taibbi are much better reading. Even if you disagree with a lot of what they write, at least they mostly try to argue in good faith.
> Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to “consumerism” or to the “environment.”
What is more worrying is that Weiss is one of the top subscribed to substack authors. So just imagine the amount of people reading this garbage. It is sad.
Back when the facebook top ten twitter still existed it consisted solely of nut job alt-right talk show hosts. Nut job alt right conspiracy theorists being at the top of substack is wholly unsurprising.
Substack is paid right? I guess there can be some groups that are paying for her subscriptions. We have seen this on the Republican side where some PAC buys out many copies of some right wing celebrities book (Tucker Carlson, Tomi Lahren, Sarah Palin and their ilk) and hands them out at conferences. This also serves the purpose of getting them added to the NY Times bestseller list and gives the impression that they are more popular than they really are. Fortunately the NY Times puts an asterisk next to the books that engage in this behavior.
But who knows really. It could also just be people supporting her because they want what Fox News used to provide but in online format.
The sophomoricism in this thread is one of the things that irked me about tech and made me go into law.
I'm going back into tech because the culture of law is much more broken and repellant, but one thing I can say in favor of lawyers over engineers is that, IME at least, they are overall much more willing to recognize when they aren't well-versed in other fields, including both substantively and in terms of mental models.
> [Lawyers] are overall much more willing to recognize when they aren't well-versed in other fields, including both substantively and in terms of mental models.
That's a refreshing perspective. Any inkling as to why? I'm guessing prolonged exposure to the adversarial process would cause lawyers to be a bit more introspective about the limits of their knowledge, but are there other reasons, too?
1. Lawyers must really internalize an attitude of recognizing the limits of what they know. They have to speak precisely. They can't make claims they can't substantiate. They can't speculate. Sometimes lawyering involves making a lot of assessments of who knows precisely how much. It also involves dealing personally with a wide range of other subject-matter experts. So what you said about the adversarial process is correct, I think.
2. Many (not all) engineers seem to downplay non-STEM qualitative thinking. On phone, so hard to fully explain, but I think part of it is that they think that because what they do is specialized and hard, other stuff is easy. Lawyers are arrogant too, but in different ways.
Maybe non-STEM stuff is easier, but it has its own complications, and I think engineers are not inclined to see them.
Would like to hear if this is consistent with the experiences of others.
People think they know something well until they have to explain it or explain the opposing position. Lawyers have to do this all the time which is probably why there is more balance. Basically the trick is to ask folks to explain something to you as if you were five.
> People think they know something well until they have to explain it or explain the opposing position. Lawyers have to do this all the time which is probably why there is more balance.
"are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law."
this assumes that there was due process, presumption of innocence and a "rule of law" to start with.
truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
I gave a bit of thought into this and came out with a solution which is called "loto-lawyer" you spin the wheel, and you get what you get as a lawyer. As ridiculous as it may sound, it would be something closer to justice...
The article doesn't assume that at all. Just because a system is unable to live up to its ideals in all (or even most) cases, we should still be concerned if the ideals themselves erode. This is a silly way to downplay the central subject.
This article doesn't offer up compelling evidence that the "ideals themselves" are eroding. It's just a collection of anecdotal examples, showing in some cases it doesn't live up to the ideals, in the author's opinion.
The central subject is people refusing the statu quo of the current justicial system. The article does not assume that indeed, but reference to people that do (lawyers over 50 etc).
I stand behind my comment and loto-lawyer to illustrate how broken the system is until we find a better alternative.
your net worth should not have anything to do with "how much justice you can afford."
Please don't call names in arguments here. It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) because it leads to much worse discussion. Your comment would be fine without that last sentence.
The relevant guideline covers this case clearly and hasn't changed in over a decade:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That would break the same guideline in the same way. It isn't necessary to call names—it doesn't add information. It suffices to point out what's wrong with an argument and trust the reader to be smart enough to get it.
A much larger part is the unequal application of the law through prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion. Also, the best lawyer won't mean much if you get an incompetent or biased judge.
Then you have the issue of just being charge will cost a ton of money. Even if you're innocent, you're financially punished. Most summary offenses cost more to hire a lawyer to defend your innocence than to plead guilty and pay the fine. This is by far the biggest farce of justice - being punished as much as a guilty person just to defend your innocence.
> this assumes that there was due process, presumption of innocence and a "rule of law" to start with.
>truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
Exactly this. The author does a lot of hand-wringing about the loss of the current institutional practices, but never stops to consider that maybe those institutional practices were never as good as they were sold to be anyway.
Justice has never been truly blind, for exactly the reasons you note. In a society that is structurally, historically biased (based on race, wealth, etc.), any institution that pretends that bias doesn't exist will simply allow that bias to be continue. This new generation has seen the flaws in that mentality and has chosen to fix them instead of continuing the problem.
To put it another way: "evil prevails when good men do nothing". The system effectively "does nothing" now by ignoring existing structural bias, and thus allows the existing evils in society - racism, classic, etc. - to affect its outcome. It doesn't matter if the system isn't designed to be "evil", or that the people acting within it don't consider themselves to be evil - The evils in society will persist if they are not actively opposed.
A change in mentality has occurred among the profession (and also as a wider cultural movement) that societal evils need to be actively called out and opposed rather than quietly tolerated. And honestly, I find it hard to disagree.
'... on how the legal system in America, as one prominent liberal scholar put it, is at risk of becoming “a totalitarian nightmare.”'
It isn't already? My experience indicates that rule of law is commonly ignored, prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion leads to biased and unequal application of the law, letter of the law and strict construction is ignored in the aim to convict people who "deserve" it, and that the rights of the people are often ignored.
I think that training on bias is a good idea. After all, some of these lawyers become judges and attention to all potential bias would be useful, and necessary for a fair trial.
Following certain lawyers on Youtube points that prosecutorial misconduct is not exactly rare and entire thing is more about narrative and misleading jury about law than the facts...
Oh yeah, I've witnessed it. An ADA held a known unsupported charge that carried pretrial restrictions only found under that charge. Then they prevented us from talking to court scheduling to secure remote accommodations for a witness (so they couldn't testify) - even though the rules of procedure/discovery didn't allow them to do that for a summary case, and violated the Bar's rules of professional conduct. I filed a complaint with the Bar. The Bar didn't even look at it. They did they'll only investigate after a court formally declares that prosecutorial misconduct occurred. Ok... so what do you actually investigate if the determination has to already be made?
The best justice money can buy. If you look past the silly complaints about word choice and such, people like Weiss are complaining that people want to change that.
Same as the nonsense about 'cancelling' - the actual complaint is that uppity low-status people are talking back.
With people like this, every complaint is an admission.
> One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he’s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.
While stopping teaching due to student fragility is rather unfortunate. I have to say this is one aspect of America's brand of justice that I think needs to change. My lay understanding is that retribution simply does not work -- and often is actually counterproductive, especially once you price in the cost of enacting the retribution. Furthermore a vengeful society or plaintiff needs to have some cooling off time, or spiritual growth to come to grips with the reality that life is full of horrific things and that making the best of it (neither nihilism nor resentfulness) is the true optimization of the system.
Instead I'd suggest that American justice needs to focus purely on rehabilitation. How can what remains be optimized? Yes that might even include giving an education to a <insert deplorable> so that they can contribute net positively to society.
I sort of agree, but the American legal system wasn't exactly in great shape before. The reaction described in the article is not good, but a reaction of some sort was expected.
Yeah, we have bigger problems in the American legal system. Such as the fact that we do almost no data collection. We have no idea how effective individual judges, courts, prisons, or prosecutors are because no one writes it down anywhere.
Oh no, it is written down. The courts have determined that their notes/complaints/etc are deserving of such secrecy that you can't even subpoena judicial complaints even if they contain exculpatory evidence. They reason that releasing complaints would undermine public trust in the judiciary. I argue that would only be the case if inappropriate punishments (or lack of punishment) were taking place. How about that for conflict of interest - the court granting themselves protections that only apply to themselves...
I had a magistrate show consistent bias (retired police chief no less), unwarrantly yell at the defense, and prevent the defense from voicing a petition to dismiss based on rights violations with the response "that's not gonna happen" (a violation of due process and the state constitution that requires defendants to be heard). It was all recorded pursuant to law. I filed a judicial complaint. They closed the complaint saying there was no evidence of wrongdoing, even though their website lists uncurteous behavior like yelling as a disciplinary infraction and I had a recording. I raised the rights violations and the fact that we were denied from having our petition even heard (another rights violation). The judge said that we would need a record that the concerns were raised in the magisterial court, even though the issue was that we couldn't raise them since we weren't allowed to present the petition. Not to mention, it was a trial de novo ("a complete do-over" according to the judge), which means this is our chance to have complete reconsideration, including the petition.
Same case had an ADA violate several rules. I filed a complaint there too. The Bar's response is that they only investigate prosecutors if the court has already formally declared prosecutorial misconduct occurred. Useless.
Honestly, incompetence and bias is rife in the judiciary. They plainly side with the institution. After all, the government is the one who pays their check, and the more buddy buddy they are with the enforcement side means the less likely they will be cited or charged with anything.
Judicial complaints and wrongdoing are so secret that it surpasses your right to exculpatory evidence. An investigation of a judge can find that they were biased or screwed up and that you were innocent, yet they are not required to turn that over to you.
This article seems to be purposefully conflating social dynamics (increased social accountability for previously acceptable 'neutral' actions) with the embrace of valid, structural criticisms of the legal system in this country and their increasing acceptance as "obvious" in legal academia.
It feels, at best, like it's purposefully conflating these things so it can discredit those criticisms.
It’s very important, if on trial, that you and your lawyer are able to frame your actions as a reaction to unfairness in our society. This article gives a concrete example where sentencing was halved when the prosecutor noted a defendant’s political alignment.
Weiss (unsurprisingly) gives a really bad-faith mischaracterization of this. What the prosecutor noted was the defendant's frame of mind because they had to in order to calculate what sentence to ask for. It's not political, it's a formula and you can read it for yourself https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17441998/67/united-stat...
>>> Weiss (unsurprisingly) gives a really bad-faith mischaracterization of this.
Well, Weiss didn't write this article. It was written by Aaron Sibarium, a contributing writer, not by Bari herself. She may well agree with his major points, however.
You’re not off to a good start. People dispensing justice want to see that you’re making strides in their movement. This article is about the people defining injustice now defining justice. It’s rational to prepare some long-lived online agreement with anyone whose goal is redefining justice.
> People dispensing justice want to see that you're making strides in their movement.
Since when was that the case? The "people dispensing justice" are judges - and separation of powers takes away the interest of the judiciary from being minded in advancing politics, ideology, and 'movements'.
The "people dispensing justice" have no business in the politics of their day -- their business is strictly concerned with law and evidence, not the fashionable ideology of a particular era - especially in the originalist and constitutional context. Any attempt by "the people dispensing justice" intentionally to advance a cause is malpractice and an abuse of process, not sound law.
It is especially worse now that the 'people defining injustice' are now being asked to jump to conclusions and assign culpability upon sand - i.e. upon allegations, rather than upon evidence. That is not the legal system of America that we know of.
> their business is strictly concerned with law and evidence, not the fashionable ideology of a particular era - especially in the originalist and constitutional context.
Constitutional originalism is the fashionable ideology of a particular era - the belief that only the inferred opinions of a closed circle of white slaveowning gentry from the 18th century are relevant to any Constitutional question, and that the centuries of social, political and cultural progress from then onward must be disregarded as "radical" and "revisionist."
No, originalism is not about fashionable ideology.
Originalism is about the *original intent* of laws, at the time when they are made.
The whole idea is rooted in stability of construction/interpretation of laws. Why this is important: if the meaning of a word of law can change so radically based on current events, then judges would find it very difficult to issue decisions and make just judgments based on precedents/stare decisis. (And judges in any event are not to interpose their personal beliefs, or current events onto the interpretation of existing law.)
Parliament makes laws, and amend laws, according to the will of the people - and judges then enforce those laws and changes. Even in the most liberal of (say common law) legal systems, judges are not to make up their own ideas of what the law means as they like.
I have no idea why you're misleading this discussion, that "Constitutional originalism is the fashionable ideology of a particular era". Originalism is not about orthodoxy, or being conservative, or the "inferred opinions of a closed circle of white slaveowning gentry", nor is it against revision - originalism is a strong way to ensure the stability of the legal system (which is the point of the article), and respect for the separation of powers, a key point of modern democracy.
Fortunately those 'white slaveowning gentry from the 18th century' provided a means of changing the Constitution. The problem is that many folks, including many judges, do not wish to do the hard work of actually changing it, but simply pretend that it says things it simply never says.
When arguing about Critical Race Theory it's useful to keep in mind this quote from the person (Christopher Rufo) who brought the term to mainstream prominence over the past year or so:
“We have successfully frozen their brand ‘critical race theory’ into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category."
The whole purpose of this phrase as used by the Bari Weiss types is to be non-specific, hard to pin down, to mean different things to different people. In other words, to make productive conversation or debate impossible.
Ironic the blog is titled "Common Sense", while the contents of the blog are asking you to discard your common sense and accept the implication that somehow the growth of interest in racial equity implies we are approaching "a totalitarian nightmare".
Here's some common sense: Most people are reasonable and aren't interested in promoting a totalitarian nightmare. If all the scary implied slippery slope stuff started actually affecting people's lives in a real and visible way, all those reasonable people would change their worldview because reasonable people want to make other people's lives better.
I find the current state of the US legal system to be abhorrent, for a variety of reasons not listed in this article. While I'm sure adding woke nonsense to the pot won't help, getting all of that culture war stuff out of the legal system still won't fix the root(s) of the problem(s).
We need a system focused on justice between individuals, not this pay to win legal system.
Edit - Ban plea deals, and publicly tar and feather any judge or prosecutor who fails to uphold the highest legal ideals.
A bit tangential, but I wonder if it's realistic to gradually migrate the common law system to something closer to the civil one. I think that the precedent bloat is one of major factors which makes lawyers expensive and judicial system badly accessible for non-lawyers.
But who I am kidding... The US was unable to even move from the imperial units and Farenheit.
I really wish Weiss would make her case more quantitatively. But while I'm at it, does she have a piece on the general structural phenomenon of institutional capture, how it works and how to fight it?
For instance:
>The problem has come not just from students, but from administrators, who often foment the forces they capitulate to. Administrators now outnumber faculty at some universities—Yale employs 5,066 administrators and just 4,937 professors—and law schools haven’t been spared the bloat.
This is an actual quantitative, causal explanation. Why does it not pothole to an entire article or study? I want to know more.
(Aaron Sibarium wrote the article, not Bari Weiss.)
It would be interesting to see whether law schools in specific have "administrator bloat". It's certainly true that generally universities have more admin than faculty--and admin frequently are higher paid, as well, especially in this era of adjuncts making $50/hour and no benefits or job security.
> and to a lesser extent, the court system, are shaped by and largely serve the needs of businesses
Meanwhile many businesses are starting to adopt the ideologies complained about in the article. Soon you won't be a viable option for providing services if you do not bear the mark "anti-racist" . Already my employer would likely retaliate and/or limit my career if it was found that I commented anything but purely affirmative towards all forms of anti-racist or critical race theory rhetoric. A rhetoric that completely strips me of any credibility due to my race and gender.
I'm just an average American with limited understanding of the "narratives" these days, but what's wrong with teaching CRT if it can help address disparities in criminal justice stats? The system doesn't seem as just as it should be, and the profession should try to fix that.
"CRT" as a thing that political actors complain about, and "CRT" the academic topic, are basically unrelated. The former is a Frankenstein's monster bogey-man built from every bad-seeming thing its crafters could attach to it[1] in order to build a rhetorical weapon. Label bad things CRT until people associate it with bad things only, then start labeling things that are good but that you don't like CRT so people automatically hate it, since you've primed them to. Any relation to academic-related CRT is incidental.
[1] Which is not a novel tactic, and it sure looks like that's what happened with this—but enough discussion of the process by some of those involved took place in the open that we don't just have to guess that that's what was going on, this time. This kind of process is carried out semi-publicly surprisingly often, I suppose because doing so is both easier and more effective than trying to keep it a secret, and, counterintuitively, evidence that it was a deliberate plan rarely seems to harm the effort or blunt its effect.
Fair question. I would argue that is is the wrong way to fix injustice. If we want impartiality in the system, and the system in not impartial, we should not add more unfairness to try to balance out the system. It it like adding more bugs to software to try to counteract the existing bugs.
Nothing - it's been deliberately and systematically demonised and now is used as a stand in for any anti-racist teaching.
It's an area of study, nothing more, nothing less. That one side of the political spectrum is hell-bent on cancelling it should give us pause for thought.
But are disparities a problem, on their face? We're supposed to have a country of diverse cultures and people. Yet, somehow, these cultures are supposed to yield more or less equal rates of people interested in different fields, more or less equal rates of success across the academic ladder, etc.
Every word spoken says "different", every actual piece of policy says "there should be no differences whatsoever". But if people's starting positions and cultures were different, they would certainly produce differential outcomes, even in a completely fair system.
very funny to write an article about the crisis in the legal system without addressing how it is a pretty good example of almost complete elite capture by a few top law schools whose admissions are far from meritocratic. Or talking about Steven Donziger vs Chevron, a case so shameful the UN Commission on Human Rights has called for his release. Or talking about the basic truth of the US legal system, where the wealthiest can nearly always afford to win a civil case just through a war of attrition by hiring incredibly expensive lawyers while the bottom 50% of America could never hope to hire one lawyer.
But I don't expect much else from Bari Weiss' publication, where the scariest thing in the world is always some college kids that asked each other their pronouns or something. Why is this even on HN
As someone who went through this process intensely and was an avid reader of places like r/lawschooladmissions (which has a lot of people posting stats and results--could be interesting to datamine and analyze), I would say no.
The one exception is affirmative action; being Black or Mexican (it's not even really generally Hispanic, IIRC, just Mexican) or Native American has a quantifiable effect equivalent to like +10 LSAT, +.x GPA or something. It's quite unfair, IMO. But it's very mechanical. For example, undergrad school prestige matters only at the very margins. Better to have a 4.0 from rando state school and a 170 LSAT score than a 4.0 from Harvard and a 167 LSAT for most law schools.
There is a whole site where people post stats and admissions results that is central to people trying to go to top schools. Nobody was getting results that deviated greatly. The racial boost was also well quantified on there (you check a box if you're an applicable race).
I don't find these examples particularly compelling. Likes to cite examples of overreach but never describe the counter arguments.
i.e. peremptory strikes. Jury selection was clearly, with many many examples, used in the past to create a group not that was not the defendant's 'peers'. Even with the '86 court ruling that nominally ended peremptory strikes on the basis of race, most lawyers recognize (as do Gerrymanderers) you can find related reasons to strike them within the realm of plausible deniability (i.e bias against police).
The author presents no reasoning from those in favor, only disgruntled and largely anonymous counterpoints.
Furthermore, the praise of S African policy is a cherry picked example and clearly far outside the mainstream. One American official praising an approach is hardly a bellwether.
Re: Kyle Rittenhouse, citing one example as a potentially adverse ruling ("liberals would hate to convict this black man!") is hardly a good counterargument towards vigilantism.
Just this week, a Florida 70 year old was acquitted after shooting dead a man who threw popcorn in his face. Even if we had to admit there is no perfect middle ground (may or may not be true), I think over-convinction of vigilantes is clearly preferable to allowing greater death and destruction through the furtherance of stupid legal theories like Stand Your Ground.
> I think over-conviction of vigilantes is clearly preferable
You are kinda making the author's point. The notion that we should over convict for the greater good is NOT what the American justice system should aim for. It is better for some guilty to go free rather than some innocent to get punished. While I agree Stand Your Ground laws are not good and suffers from the same problem: this notion of presuming guilt until proven otherwise.
Agreed. These are important issues, so discussion would be enriched by robustness and completeness. Critical Race Theory is mostly about the problem and might be addressed by any number of actions. In this piece only one possible reaction is examined. It is also very important to look at the full range social variation within what we call race. Currently Nigerian immigrants are one of the top earning groups and while the Black middle and upper class may be small they do not necessarily share the same issues as people who are stuck in ghettos or living on the street.
Indeed, and in another example he complains of someone getting “only” a 10 year sentence, instead of the maximum 20. If anything, that’s a counter-argument, proving that the changes happening are not of great significance.
If you want a real story about takeover of the legal system, read about the Stephen Donzinger case. Donzinger represented indigenous Ecuadorians in a suit against Chevron. Chevron, having unlimited resources to put into the suit, lost in Ecuador- but has not paid their fine, instead attempting to make an example of the lawyer representing the Ecuadorians by burying him in frivolous lawsuits, trying to get him disbarred, placing him in prison for refusing to violate attorney-client privilege. They appointed a private law firm- one that used to represent Chevron- to represent the government in the case. At this point, when it really matters to them, major corporations own the United States legal system.
> All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America’s law schools. It was mandatory. Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality” ...
Sounds good. Lots of people mistake the law for morality, it's important to make them think about how that's not the case, and if the law is made by agenda-driven politicians, it will necessarily be unfair to some.
> As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” ...
Sounds good. These are things adults should know about.
> One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he’s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.
Sounds good. Deterrence is ineffective, and the criminal justice system needs to move to a more rehabilitative model.
> [reparations & prison abolition shirt image]
I'm not sure why I should care about this. It's not censorship or illiberalism to advocate for these positions.
> At Boston College Law School this semester, a constitutional law professor asked students: “Who does not think we should scrap the constitution?” According to a student in the class, not a single person raised their hand.
This would be the expected response to any question in an 8 a.m. class.
I could go on. These cancel culture/critical race theory/campus illiberalism stories are junk.
> > > At Boston College Law School this semester, a constitutional law professor asked students: “Who does not think we should scrap the constitution?” According to a student in the class, not a single person raised their hand.
> This would be the expected response to any question in an 8 a.m. class.
Not only that, you're gonna get a fair number of votes for "scrap" in any classroom full of people who've spent much time studying and thinking about the constitution. Most "no" votes will likely be from people approaching it practically, as too difficult to realistically improve on in the current political environment—an "in an ideal world" kind of framing would have a real chance of getting a very sincere and considered, universal "yes" from the whole class.
This is because it's fairly bad, and it's been (plenty) long enough to see exactly how and why it's bad. Some parts never worked right (the electoral college comes to mind, which broke completely about as soon as it came in contact with reality and effectively never worked the way, or had the effect, that was intended, at all) and a bunch more kinda work, but are clearly not optimal compared with proven alternatives.
It really wasn't, and I'm sorry. I'll bring this up at the next Deep State meeting. Keeping college kids under control is something that all political conspiracies struggle with, and we'll do better.
I've recently read Huntington's American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony [1], which I highly recommend.
I used to be quite hateful when it came to Huntington, I regard his "clash of civilisations" theory quite bogus (or I used to, not so much anymore with this war in Ukraine), and as such this was my first book by him that I've read. Published in 1981 it goes through what Huntington calls periods of creedal passion, which are somehow cyclic: 1770-1780 (the Revolutionary period), 1830-1840 (the Jackson years), 1890-1900 (the progressives/populists), 1960-1975 (the civil rights movement, revolts against the military-industrial complex).
I was reminded of that book because of this quote from the article:
> At the University of Illinois Chicago, for example, a law professor’s classes were cancelled and his career threatened for including a bleeped out “‘n____’” on an exam in a hypothetical scenario about employment discrimination. (He had used the same scenario for years without incident.) (italics mine)
because Huntington had mentioned the same thing happening in the 1960s-first part of the 1970s (especially the first part of the 1970s), when things that used to be regarded as normal (for lack of a better word) when carried out by the powers that be (the Government, the police, the University administrations etc) suddenly became tabu and very, very blameable. I.e. exactly like described in this article.
I wouldn't have probably brought this up if the description above wouldn't have reminded me of another excellent comparison Huntington made in his book, that between the creedal passion period of the 1960s-early '70s present in the US and what happened during China's Cultural Revolution. This actual fear (because that's what it is) the professors/teachers have now of their students (supposedly the same thing happened back in the '60s) is pretty similar, as a feeling, at least, to what the University professors in China must have felt during the Cultural Revolution (and yes, I do know that the Chinese professors ended up having a definitely worst fate, but I was talking/writing about the general feeling present in both cases).
Really interesting stuff. Google-ing around for some sources I've also found this Vox article [2] from 2016 that writes about the same book, this time with Trump's election as a focus (I personally think Trump's election and what's described in this article are part of the same, greater thing).
> The final section blames South Africa's recent issues on... checks notes... the end of apartheid.
You have a much more creative sense of reading comprehension than I do.
Nobody said anything about the end of apartheid. They are complaining about the bad things that can/could come having a legal system that is not demographically blind. The article quoted someone saying something dumb about implementing a policy like SA did that had less than stellar results. And then the article went on to quote people who were calling that original quote dumb.
And what inferences do you draw from who she is that we can't draw from what she has gone on the record saying, regarding her opinions of South African apartheid?
Yes. "Cancel culture" is, apparently, the result of a combination of the observation of mass unfairness, and the public voicing of reactions to bad behavior. Both of these things are natural and do not represent a change in culture - what's changed is the social internet's inherent (i.e. it would happen regardless of any bias) effect of making both things hyper-visibile (which multiplies, since more visibility of the former produces more instances of the latter, which in turn are also more visible).
The reaction to cancel culture is mostly a dissatisfaction with this completely natural problem, but which attempts to paint it as a whole-cloth invention of their political enemies, and uses highly cherry-picked examples of bad outcomes to falsely represent the whole massive phenomenon.
In short, when hundreds of millions of people's voices are public by default, every opinion, thought, or emotion looks like a "mob".
I flag them because they're bait for this sort of resentful complaining.
Normally I hide them rather than look at the comments, too, but I went "maybe this one is better?". And it's not. Standard cancel-culture hand-wringing about literally nothing, by an author whose claim to fame is finding increasingly nasty things to say and claiming that no, it is everyone else who is mean.
It's tiresome, HN doesn't need it, flag and move on.
> I flag them because they're bait for this sort of resentful complaining.
That's an interesting perspective. Personally, the stuff about not being able to get a lawyer to represent one is deeply concerning (to me, at least). I'd much prefer if this didn't happen, because innocent until proven guilty is an incredibly important feature of our society.
Can you clarify what exactly you feel like the resentful complaining is?
Considering the article directly discusses how professors and professionals are self-censoring because of the woke community threatening their livelihoods, I have to say you are quantitatively wrong.
I would agree, except that flamebait is whatever goes against the consensus opinion, regardless of whether the article or post is well sourced discussions and rational.
So I have sympathy are there really aren't many options for those who are frustrated with the narrow views around here, and where even daring to suggest that this is the case, means that they stand to be accused of flamebait.
Even if you're right, there are degrees of inflammation and it's important to avoid the hotter ones.
> the narrow views around here
Hmm, I'd be careful about such generalizations—they usually come from a much smaller set of data points than it feels like they do, resulting in false feelings of generality. People who go down that path mostly end up feeling like "around here" is dominated by the views they most dislike, which is usually neither a pleasant nor an accurate perception.
Careful what you wish for. Just because something is flawed, doesn't mean that burning it down will replace it with something better. It's the same reason why most revolutions to overthrow dictators usually become as bad or worse than what they replaced.
The article isn't about revolutionaries throwing incendiary devices through the windows of law schools. It's about the vested members of the establishment itself voting by a 20-to-1 margin to reflect on the flaws of their system. It's the most mild, milquetoast revolution of all time.
I actually agree that common law systems kinda suck in a lot of ways, but their replacement with personal power pretending to be professional judgement is a step backward, not forward.
> “I got into this job because I liked to play devil’s advocate,” said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family.”
And tech is the next menu item that they will gobble up.
It's quite a leap from someone not personally wanting to represent an alleged rapist to not wanting someone to have representation at all, but the author made that leap easily within only a few paragraphs. The rest of the article goes in to the real point they're making (anti-CRT yadda yadda) but the original premise is so shaky that I just can't take it seriously.
> someone not personally wanting to represent an alleged rapist
(1) That isn't what happened. The junior associate wanted severance because the named partner represented him.
(2) I would fire any junior attorney who said such a thing. You may think it's acceptable; I do not. Everyone deserves an attorney, not just even when accused of heinous crimes, but especially when accused of heinous crimes. Prejudging a client or potential client based solely on the allegation and news media is antithetical to everything the profession stands for.
To add: the defence provided to a client is limited ordinarily to what is legally feasible, and what is ethically honourable (i.e. 'winning' does not mean going to the extent of pulling out dishonourable defences to ensure the accused client win).
The above are fair, and reasonable considerations for any lawyer to mete out to an accused client, in the interests of a fair trial, and for the ends of justice.
Yet what the "woke" community asserts is that any form of representation for accused people - accused, not convicted - is heinous in itself. It is surprising, since the legal fraternity should be first to understand that allegations are not truth -- that even law students have fallen short of this is worrisome, as they are the future lawyers and judges of the country.
1) It looks like I misread subtext. I took it to mean the lawyer did not want to assist Boies in defending Weinstein. I suppose it's a little different if they're just some random unrelated lawyer at the firm. Still, the author made a huge leap from point A to point B.
2) Sure, firing them is your right. I just think it is perfectly acceptable to hold people accountable for their actions even if they felt morally obligated to perform those actions. And I fully support those that choose not to associate themselves with anyone, for any reason.
Can we not pretend that taking the Weinstein case wasn't about some high-minded, principled act? This is the same law firm that hired private investigators to spy on victims in an effort to build smear campaigns. They did it for money, not morality.
Yes, everyone deserves an attorney. That's why public defenders are a thing. If Harvey Weinstein weren't rich and famous, that's likely what he would have had for his defense.
There's a huge leap from "everyone deserves an attorney" to "everyone deserves a big, high-powered, (and I would argue unscrupulous) law firm"
>This is the same law firm that hired private investigators to spy on victims in an effort to build smear campaigns. They did it for money, not morality.
Then we ought also infer that the junior associates trying to quit-with-severance in objection were doing it for money, not morality.
> Everyone deserves an attorney, not just even when accused of heinous crimes, but especially when accused of heinous crimes.
Yes, but no lawyer should be forced to defend a specific person either. Effective representation requires at least a basic level of trust and communication between client and lawyer - the consistent negative outcomes associated with poor persons unable to afford their own lawyer and being forced to rely on public defenders who are often overworked and underpaid are long known [1] [2], not to mention that unlike e.g. Germany, DAs in the US are not required to also search for evidence that is helpful to the defense.
In the end, issues of payment aside there will always be a lawyer interested in taking on any case - no matter how heinous - simply because of the publicity that showing good work in defending a client will bring.
The amount of help you can expect from a public defender is nearly zero. Specifically, they'll do two things for you - they will tell you how fucked you are, and that you should take a plea bargain.
Their budget, and therefore, the amount of hours/resources they can devote to your case is a tiny fraction of that of the prosecutor's office.
If everyone on trial had to use a public defender, you'd see this system get fixed by next year. But they don't - which is why people like the author of TFA can wring their hands over how unfair it is that Weinstein is poo-pooed for getting the legal representation in the world. What a travesty! What an injustice! What a generation-defining moment! But please, pay no attention to how the animals and proles get to navigate the legal system.
I would rather have a system like here in Germany for criminal trials where the defendant chooses the lawyer they work with and the lawyer gets paid a set hourly rate by the government.
As a quasi-PD, I may be biased, but I have seen hourly-rate lawyers pass up excellent resolutions to a case for no good reason.
My last jury trial is a good example. There was a lot of mitigating evidence and the prosecutor didn't have a grudge against our client. A non-criminal disposition was discussed and tentatively agreed between myself and the prosecutor. Retained counsel advised against it and client proceeded to trial. Lost on the merits and now has a conviction for a dozen counts of fraud. Then mitigation evidence came in during sentencing and he got no jail time, just had to pay restitution.
But he still has a criminal record. And he didn't need to have one. But the retained counsel got paid, so...
The leap from 'junior associate at a fancy law firm made a bold request based on principles' to 'the American legal system is under attack by whiny, ultra-liberal wreckers' blew me away. But as you pointed out, that's not the point of the article. The author's purpose is to whine about right-wing windmills for 5,000 word.
Most legal bills are paid by large corporations. The U.S. is the leader in this respect--on average U.S. companies spend about 0.4% of their revenue on legal services, almost triple the rate in a civil law country like Germany. Effectively most lawyers (including me) work directly or indirectly for businesses. This means that the legal education system, and to a lesser extent, the court system, are shaped by and largely serve the needs of businesses.
And what are all of these businesses doing with their legal spending? Largely litigation defense, transactions (M&A, issuing securities, or buying/selling assets like real estate), and interacting with government and regulators.
Lawyers that don't work for large business organizations spend their time representing individuals or classes of plaintiffs in tort litigation or in matters like criminal defense, immigration assistance, family law, or estate planning. Things that may not involve the huge dollar amounts of business transactions but that matter a lot to the people affected.
For every law school class on critical race theory or other topics the writer criticizes, a law student will take dozens on administrative procedure, taxation, federal courts, etc. etc. etc.
There are many valid criticisms of the American legal system. For example, you might feel that it's too easy to file a frivolous lawsuit that will settle for nuisance value. Or you might observe that corporations have been able to cripple or stall regulation that the public demands. Or that mass incarceration is bad social policy. This kind of introspection, including CRT, has long been a part of the academy and the profession, and I think a useful one.
The situation depicted in this article, that everyone's suddenly gone out of control "woke," is just ridiculous and doesn't at all fit my own experience.