Top law firm rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letter
nbcnews.com
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The firm’s values:
"John W. Davis's legal career is most remembered for his final appearance before the Supreme Court, in which he unsuccessfully defended the "separate but equal" doctrine in Briggs v. Elliott, a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. Davis, as a defender of racial segregation and state control of education, argued that South Carolina had shown good faith in attempting to eliminate any inequality between black and white schools and should be allowed to continue to do so without judicial intervention." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Polk#Race_relations
Things may have changed.
(Though I cannot pass on the opportunity to remind that some of the largest protests against school desegregation were in Boston)
They were, yes. For example, Senator Robert Byrd was KKK, and Governor George Wallace was a Democrat before running for President in 1968 as an independent.
> Things may have changed.
They have. The south started to flip from Democratic to Republican during the civil rights era.
Correct. The answer to "are they" is no.
John W. Davis died in 1955 [1]. I think your comment is relevant, funny and informative. But it doesn't rise to making the rescission hypocritical.
Well, the Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional in the 60s, and the Klan is now a shell of its former self, so I wouldn't put too much weight into "are" vs. "were". They were contemporaneous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan#Current_developme...
> John W. Davis died in 1955 [1]. I think your comment is relevant, funny and informative. But it doesn't rise to making the rescission hypocritical.
Yet the law firm still carries his name, and in first position, the first impression.
Of course it's probably silly to talk about a law firm with almost $2 billion in annual revenue having any values whatsoever besides money and power.
Defense attorneys who represent obvious pedophiles, murderers, robbers, etc, don't value those concepts.
In this case, they did. Davis wasn't just a lawyer, he was a politician: "Davis acquired much of his father's southern Democratic politics, opposing women's suffrage, Federal child-labor laws and anti-lynching legislation, and Harry S. Truman's civil rights program. He defended states' rights to establish the poll tax by questioning whether uneducated non-taxpayers should be allowed to vote." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Davis
But I agree with your underlying point -- you can't read a lawyer's values from a particular client's values in isolation.
That also goes for calls for a "nationwide boycott", however informal, by employers of students associated with the unpopular cause of the day, or demands by large donors for the resignations of university leaders that did not insufficiently condemn pro-Hamas words by others associated with the universities.
(And yes, despite the large-scale infiltration of leftist anti-Semitism into academia and politics in recent decades that has now hugely backfired on the Jews that were among its aiders and abetters, support of Hamas is still the unpopular cause, relatively speaking. But not as unpopular as it ought to be.)
Still, effort should be made to widen the discourse again, instead of reiterating bad ideas like "speech has consequences".
It’s material that these are law students. Not undergrads. Undergrads should have room to be stupidly wrong and learn from it; that’s what academic freedom is for.
That said, they’re still kids. Davis Polk has the right to do what they did; I’d make the same call in their place. But I also wouldn’t mind having these people on a legal team I hired, provided there was afterthought to their actions.
One might argue that they're adults, they have left the 'nest', they can drive, vote, drink, operate guns, etc... Actions have consequences, people learn this even before college.
I'm not defending the law firms nor the students. Students have their right to say whatever they wish, and companies have their right to hire based on whatever non-discriminating criteria they wish. 'Political tribe' is not a legally protected group, so I don't see the problem here. Maybe it's for the best, the students may end up working for human rights NGOs instead of big law.
How is that letter showing human rights values?
Also what about the statement is kneejerk? Please explain.
Knee-jerk means behaving in a predictable manner, following the easiest path.
A knee-jerk response would be condemnation of Hamas and support of Israel because that's how all of our media is telling us to respond.
Both-sides-ing can also be a knee-jerk response for some people who habitually try to claim some middle moral high ground.
Taking a contrarian position, knowing that it may hurt them personally like this, is the opposite of knee-jerk.
In those environments, it's common to use the term "apartheid" to refer to Israel's treatment of Palestinians. And it can look that way, if you haven't looked at the history. Israel segregates Gaza, allowing people into Israel only to work, and carefully scrutinized. They provide much of Gaza's water and energy, and been able to cut it off (which they now have). That's a superficial view, failing to take into account the history of the conflict, but it's definitely the case that it's common in certain left-leaning circles like college campuses.
In a lot of those places, the recent atrocity by Hamas is making them question that view. But it really does sound as if these students were living in an environment where they had been reinforcing Palestinian victimhood, and supporting Palestine is exactly what I'd call a knee-jerk reaction.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/10/10/nyu-law-student-ryna-...
A prominent international law firm has rescinded its job offer to NYU Law School Bar Association student president Ryna Workman over “inflammatory” comments regarding the deadly weekend attacks on Israel by Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Here it was the law firm of Winston & Strawn in Chicago.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/davis-polk-emplo...
I think there's likely a confluence of factors here[0]:
a) Firm might feel clients don't want people who signed the letter to work on their matters (and clients, stupidly and surprisingly, do ask and care about which rando individual associates work on their matters).
b) Some people are taking massive license with this latest terrorist attack on Israel to make bold-faced calls for violence and air a lot of bigotry, and large segments of society are letting them get away with it.
A lot of people have been dismayed to see criticism of Israel and acknowledgement of its role in exacerbating the conflict becoming more common in general; at the moment, they have the opportunity to silence a lot of dissent on this issue once again, and are only helped by statements as ridiculous and extreme as letters pinning blame on the conflict solely on Israel.
c) Big law jobs are shrinking after a period where law firms felt they couldn't get enough elite law talent, and now market power is moving to the firms once again.
d) It should be noted that Davis Polk is major prestige and thus less likely to have to give a fuh about reputation among law schools and law students than most law firms. Nobody except the most dedicated partisan is going to boycott Davis Polk over this.
In talking to career people at Columbia, there was this assumption that for some of the "lesser" big law firms, such as the one I ended up at, which were lower in both prestige and the number of CLS grads they hired, it was possible for the firm to piss Columbia off and get kicked out of Columbia's OCI and that this would be a bigger L for the firm than for Columbia. Not the case for Davis Polk.
[0] I'm not commenting on whether move was reasonable or appropriate. I can make arguments various ways on that issue, personally. I'm just thinking of this more descriptively.
Signing something without charging money?
> At this time, we remain in dialogue with two of these students to ensure that any further color being offered to us by these students is considered
What does this even mean?
"1. To add flourish or provide an interesting accompaniment to something."
"2. To embellish or exaggerate something so as to give it the appearance of truth, credibility, or plausibility."
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/give+color+to+(somethin...
If they apologise, in essence, or provide context, e.g. they didn’t read what they signed, or it was edited after they signed it.
"Davis Polk rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letters" doesn't make much sense to most readers, does it?
There are a lot of mid-tier law firms in New York City. And where in your proposed headline does it say "which operates out of a high-rise in Manhattan"?
Picking on the existing headline seems pointless to me
An "opinion" that torturing, raping, and killing is ok under the circumstances?
No, that's only "free expression" if you accept that you've now put yourself outside the bounds of civilized society and the rule of law.
One way of reading your comment is that it advocates violence against the people who signed the letter of opinion (they have put themselves outside the bounds of the "rule of law" after all).
Someone applauds violence, and then when anyone calls them out, complains that they're being threatened.
Either that, or you're just nitpicking at words.
we're done here. have the last word if that's important to you.