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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

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.

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hobbyjogger 5y ago
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.
- rayiner 5y ago
  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.
  - olsonjeffery 5y ago
    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?
    - treis 5y ago
      This is a poor "what aboutism" response to their point.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      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.
  - hobbyjogger 5y ago
    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).
SauciestGNU 5y ago
- TruthIsHeresy 5y ago
  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.
  - SauciestGNU 5y ago
    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.
    - adamsmith143 5y ago
      "She has opinions I disagree with therefore she has bad motivations" Nice.
    - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
      The author (Aaron Sibarium) is a he, not a she.
      - SauciestGNU 5y ago
        Thanks for the correction. I looked at the subdomain and read the article but I assumed Bari was the only person writing for beriweiss.substack.com
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  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.)
ss108 5y ago
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.
- yeahwhatever10 5y ago
  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?
  - ss108 5y ago
    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.
    - adamsmith143 5y ago
      >Weiss is an uncredentialed Why is this relevant? It's also wrong considering she has graduated with a degree from Columbia...
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rayiner 5y ago
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-universitys-interim-dean-admits-to-being-a-racist-during-digital-town-hall 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 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-lawyers/ https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/a-speech-code-for-lawye...
- ta1647960311 5y ago
  > 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 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 5y ago
    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.")
marlowe221 5y ago
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.
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  > 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/2016/07/15/war-cops/87142936/ 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.
- escapedmoose 5y ago
  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.
api 5y ago
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.
- ss108 5y ago
  It's real, it's just blown way out of proportion (see my comment above).
- hobbyjogger 5y ago
  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.
  - ss108 5y ago
    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/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/samier-saeed-9335553a/ Thanks
knighthack 5y ago
> 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.
- digisign 5y ago
  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.
- ss108 5y ago
  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.
RajT88 5y ago
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_from_The_New_York_Times 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.
legalcorrection 5y ago
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.

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hobbyjogger 5y ago

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.

rayiner 5y ago
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.
- olsonjeffery 5y ago
  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?
  - treis 5y ago
    This is a poor "what aboutism" response to their point.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    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.
- hobbyjogger 5y ago
  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).

SauciestGNU 5y ago

TruthIsHeresy 5y ago
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.
- SauciestGNU 5y ago
  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.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    "She has opinions I disagree with therefore she has bad motivations" Nice.
  - AlchemistCamp 5y ago
    The author (Aaron Sibarium) is a he, not a she.
    - SauciestGNU 5y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I looked at the subdomain and read the article but I assumed Bari was the only person writing for beriweiss.substack.com
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
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.)

ss108 5y ago

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.

yeahwhatever10 5y ago
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?
- ss108 5y ago
  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.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
    >Weiss is an uncredentialed Why is this relevant? It's also wrong considering she has graduated with a degree from Columbia...

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rayiner 5y ago

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-universitys-interim-dean-admits-to-being-a-racist-during-digital-town-hall 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 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-lawyers/ https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/a-speech-code-for-lawye...

ta1647960311 5y ago
> 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 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 5y ago
  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.")

marlowe221 5y ago

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.

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
> 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/2016/07/15/war-cops/87142936/ 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.
escapedmoose 5y ago
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.

api 5y ago

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.

ss108 5y ago
It's real, it's just blown way out of proportion (see my comment above).
hobbyjogger 5y ago
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.
- ss108 5y ago
  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/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/samier-saeed-9335553a/ Thanks

knighthack 5y ago

> 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.

digisign 5y ago
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.
ss108 5y ago
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.

RajT88 5y ago

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_from_The_New_York_Times 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.

legalcorrection 5y ago

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.