Maybe this is a little churlish, but while I agree that we should say that a person that finishes out his prison sentence should be considered to have paid his debt and from then forward be on an equal footing, I think that should be equal footing. We shouldn't let our cultural love affairs with redemption narratives sway our judgments to the point where we are treating someone better for having gone to prison.

It is really really hard to become a law professor. Not only are there a huge group of lawyers that would love to become law professors, but because of the difficulty in getting social science appointments and because law professorships pay significantly better than social science appointments, there's now a huge group of Phds also vying for these spots.

Shon Hopewood went to the University of Washington law school. He may well have been the only tenure track hire that graduated from that law school in ten years. Not that its a bad school, but law and especially the law professoriat is incredibly credentialist. Yes, he got a good Court of Appeals clerkship, but I'd bet there's members of the Elect (those that had SCOTUS clerkships) on the market that didn't get tenure track offers this year, much less offers at Georgetown. Maybe you'd say, well he's going to be great in the classroom -- students will get an entirely unique perspective. I'm sure that's true, but law schools don't hire tenure track professors because they'll be good in the classroom. At best that might be a partial factor in hiring adjuncts (the primary factor being willingness to take the starvation wages they pay adjuncts).

All of which I mention just to show that this really does look like putting a finger on the scale. I grew up in this society, I'm not immune to the pull of a redemption narrative. It does speak to me, but I think when we step back and think about it we really shouldn't be favoring people that did things like commit armed robbery over those that didn't. Even if they paid their debt. Equal footing, sure, but not better.