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Comment by matthewmcg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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).

The changes at the ACLU are well documented: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

Efforts by the ABA to impose commitments on lawyers that could interfere with the duty of zealous advocacy are well documented: https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/a-speech-code-for-lawye...

> 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.")

> 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.

Wow, great metaphor! I’ll be saving that one for later

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.

Yeah that definitely needed context lol

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.

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.

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.

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."

Insofar as "CRT" encompasses, for example, Ibram Kendi's assertion that positive discrimination is required to overcome past discrimination, most Americans oppose that: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ... (in college admission); https://www.insightintodiversity.com/majority-of-americans-b... (in hiring decisions).

Insofar as "CRT" is associated with various left-wing criminal justice ideas, most Americans, including so-called "people of color" oppose them: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...

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.

I generally agree with you on this, esp the point about Dem voters actually disliking it.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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"

>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.

> 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.

https://wwws.law.northwestern.edu/about/news/newsdisplay.cfm...

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.

Yet you still managed to misquote him, because what he said wasn't controversial enough for you.

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.

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 and there is significant realistic dispute: https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/...

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.

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?

This is a poor "what aboutism" response to their point.

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.

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).

> Most Americans would say that an American businessman has more of a right to effective legal counsel than foreign jihadists detained in Guantanamo.

1. Alleged foreign jihadists. An incredibly small minority of whom have actually been convicted, mostly (6 of 8) through plea deals. [1]

2. Little surprise (though, citation needed) that most Americans disagree the Constitution. That doesn't mean we should burn the document.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/detention/guan...

> Little surprise (though, citation needed) that most Americans disagree the Constitution. That doesn't mean we should burn the document.

I agree! Tell that to the folks this article is talking about, who say stuff like “the Constitution is racist.” (E.g. https://www.newsweek.com/elie-mystal-doubles-down-against-ha.... Author is the former editor of a popular legal news site.)

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.

I just graduated from Columbia Law and am currently a biglaw first year. I agree with you pretty much entirely.

Her article is idiotic and so is most of this thread.

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.

>Weiss is an uncredentialed

Why is this relevant? It's also wrong considering she has graduated with a degree from Columbia...

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.

I'm not saying that.

You originally replied to this comment:

"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.

>Furthermore, the difficulty in finding the exact degree program seems very suspicious.

So you indeed are implying that she lied about her degree

No but whatever I say won't convince you. You clearly have an agenda that you are trying to push.

>Furthermore, the difficulty in finding the exact degree program seems very suspicious.

So what exactly are you suspicious of?

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.

And this strangeness implies what exactly?

She's also not even the author.

Not law school.

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.

Weiss isn’t the author… she also has a degree from Columbia which makes her more credible than someone who posts based of a URL.

An Ivy League degree doesn’t make you credible. Weiss is a well-known crank and her opinions should generally be assumed to be trolling.

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.

Do we actually know what degree she has? Wikipedia only says that she has a "BA". That could be so many different disciplines...

I think someone on here said history. I'm not sure.

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.

You are correct though she isn't the author, but everyone in this thread assumes she is haha

(The actual author also seems unqualified to argue the issue)

> she also has a degree from Columbia

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.

I just graduated from an Ivy League law school and I found the article spot-on. So which of us is wrong?

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.

It's like inflation. Not everyone sees it at the same time

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.

Can you see the opposite viewpoint?

Which one?

Unless it was Yale, I'd wager you're finding examples of something that triggers you everywhere because ppl are primed to do that.

It's one of the fallacies of the woke crowd as well.

Would be interested in hearing more about your exp. I can provide more details of mine as well.

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’m privy to the mailing list threads another T14. The article is spot on.

Mailing lists != what most people actually spend most of their time learning at elite law schools and what they will end up doing as lawyers

No, but I think how people express themselves to future colleagues on a mailing list says a lot about how they think.

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.

Who is "her"? Are you referring to an article other than the OP? (author is Aaron Sibarium)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Bari Weiss is not a lawyer.

However, Bari Weiss did resign from the NYT over "Cancel Culture":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2020:_Resignation_f...

The whole wiki is a great read, if you want to understand what her slant is.

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.

It's real, it's just blown way out of proportion (see my comment above).

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:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/samier-saeed-9335553a/

Thanks

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