6 ms·

Top law firm rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letter

24 points by djkivi 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago
[flagged]
- soupfordummies 3y ago
  What do you mean?
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    That people who did publicly cast doubt over COVID and election issues, suffered worse consequences with much less comment.
Scoundreller 3y ago
> These statements are simply contrary to our firm’s values 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?
- starttoaster 3y ago
  > What does [to give color] 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+(something) https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/give+color+to+(somethin...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > What does this even mean? 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.
mistrial9 3y ago
isn't it telling that the law office is not named individually, but named in a collective identity as "Top law firm" ? This literally says "you are being punished by the indisputable authority" .. for signing a considered letter of opinion ! let's be very clear about what is happening.. not the subject of the conflict, but the effects on collective public expression
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Uhhh nope... The firm is named in the subheadline, and it's not a recognizable enough name to go in the headline: "Davis Polk rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letters" doesn't make much sense to most readers, does it?
  - starttoaster 3y ago
    "New York City law firm Davis Polk rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letters" makes sense. I think it's fairly well understood, at least to all Americans, that if you own a law firm that operates out of a high rise in Manhattan, you're probably a "top law firm."
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      At that point they can just say "Top law firm Davis Polk" and then might decide that they prefer the shorter headline of "Top law firm".
    - catlover76 3y ago
      No, it doesn't communicate that to most readers. 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
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- 3y ago
intermerda 3y ago
[flagged]
lapcat 3y ago
> the students’ statements don’t represent the firm’s values. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Polk#Race_relations
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Are Democrats the party of the KKK and Jim Crow? 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)
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > Are Democrats the party of the KKK and Jim Crow? 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.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > They were 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Davis
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > Correct. The answer to "are they" is no. 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_developments 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.
senderista 3y ago
Just goes to show that "cancel culture" isn't unique to any political persuasion. Very, very few people have impartial principles.
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  When I don't want to hire you, that is not the same as wanting to cancel you. If they share the names of the people they rejected, that would be much closer to "cancelling".
  - senderista 3y ago
    Other people are doing that: https://nypost.com/2023/10/12/truck-at-harvard-ousts-names-of-students-involved-in-letter-attacking-israel/ https://nypost.com/2023/10/12/truck-at-harvard-ousts-names-o...
- matt005 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - tguvot 3y ago
    [flagged]
ericfrazier 3y ago
This is understandable as it shows an incredible lack of critical thinking on the student's part. Being an effective lawyer means not knee jerk reacting.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > it shows an incredible lack of critical thinking on the student's part 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.
  - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    > they’re still kids. 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.
    - weatherlite 3y ago
      > may end up working for human rights NGOs instead of big law How is that letter showing human rights values?
      - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
        That's not for debate, not here, please. It will only be the start of a mindless circlejerk
- 3y ago
catlover76 3y ago
As a Columbia Law grad who spent time in biglaw, this is actually kind of surprising. Law firms, to a degree that surprised me, don't really like to jeopardize their reputation with the top law schools (I'm thinking here the top 6, of which Columbia and Harvard are 2). 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.
Ajay-p 3y ago
This was not the first. It appears that several attorneys have had job offers rescinded due to comments made regarding the conflict. https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/10/10/nyu-law-student-ryna-workman-lose-job-offer-israel-hamas-comments/ 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.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Davis Polk handled this better: they didn't name the students. (Counterpoint: they're doubling down with any nuance about the difference between advocating for Palestinians and supporting Hamas' tactics added as an afterthought [1].) [1] https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-campus-gaza-war/ https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-c...
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"On Tuesday, the firm said it was reconsidering that decision for two of the three students, who fought their dismissals and said that they did not authorize the letters, which did not have any individual signatories." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/davis-polk-employment-columbia-harvard-israel-palestine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/davis-polk-emplo...
TMWNN 3y ago
I'm a First Amendment absolutist who doesn't like what is going on. Winston & Strawn and Davis, Polk & Wardell had decided that the law students qualified for job offers. That the firms decided that the students no longer qualified because of something, not violating the law, that the students are associated with is alarming. 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.)
- tguvot 3y ago
  ain't under current legal framework in usa what those companies do can be classified as free speech as well ? i remember some cases in past years that classified actions in this way
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  True, in a way it is just making the same mistakes of silencing unpopular opinions. I hope these Harvard students stayed way under their potential with a message like this at a time when Israel was invaded. It reflects badly on the education. This was a bit beyond bad taste. Still, effort should be made to widen the discourse again, instead of reiterating bad ideas like "speech has consequences".
- matt005 3y ago
  [flagged]

24 points by djkivi 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago

[flagged]

soupfordummies 3y ago
What do you mean?
- h2odragon 3y ago
  That people who did publicly cast doubt over COVID and election issues, suffered worse consequences with much less comment.

Scoundreller 3y ago

> These statements are simply contrary to our firm’s values 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?

starttoaster 3y ago
> What does [to give color] 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+(something) https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/give+color+to+(somethin...
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> What does this even mean? 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.

mistrial9 3y ago

isn't it telling that the law office is not named individually, but named in a collective identity as "Top law firm" ? This literally says "you are being punished by the indisputable authority" .. for signing a considered letter of opinion ! let's be very clear about what is happening.. not the subject of the conflict, but the effects on collective public expression

ethanbond 3y ago
Uhhh nope... The firm is named in the subheadline, and it's not a recognizable enough name to go in the headline: "Davis Polk rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letters" doesn't make much sense to most readers, does it?
- starttoaster 3y ago
  "New York City law firm Davis Polk rescinds job offers to Ivy League students who signed Israel letters" makes sense. I think it's fairly well understood, at least to all Americans, that if you own a law firm that operates out of a high rise in Manhattan, you're probably a "top law firm."
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    At that point they can just say "Top law firm Davis Polk" and then might decide that they prefer the shorter headline of "Top law firm".
  - catlover76 3y ago
    No, it doesn't communicate that to most readers. 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
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
3y ago

intermerda 3y ago

[flagged]

lapcat 3y ago

> the students’ statements don’t represent the firm’s values. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Polk#Race_relations

readthenotes1 3y ago
Are Democrats the party of the KKK and Jim Crow? 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)
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Are Democrats the party of the KKK and Jim Crow? 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > They were 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Davis
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > Correct. The answer to "are they" is no. 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_developments 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.

senderista 3y ago

Just goes to show that "cancel culture" isn't unique to any political persuasion. Very, very few people have impartial principles.

kspacewalk2 3y ago
When I don't want to hire you, that is not the same as wanting to cancel you. If they share the names of the people they rejected, that would be much closer to "cancelling".
- senderista 3y ago
  Other people are doing that: https://nypost.com/2023/10/12/truck-at-harvard-ousts-names-of-students-involved-in-letter-attacking-israel/ https://nypost.com/2023/10/12/truck-at-harvard-ousts-names-o...
matt005 3y ago
[flagged]
- tguvot 3y ago
  [flagged]

ericfrazier 3y ago

This is understandable as it shows an incredible lack of critical thinking on the student's part. Being an effective lawyer means not knee jerk reacting.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> it shows an incredible lack of critical thinking on the student's part 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.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  > they’re still kids. 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.
  - weatherlite 3y ago
    > may end up working for human rights NGOs instead of big law How is that letter showing human rights values?
    - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
      That's not for debate, not here, please. It will only be the start of a mindless circlejerk
3y ago

catlover76 3y ago

As a Columbia Law grad who spent time in biglaw, this is actually kind of surprising. Law firms, to a degree that surprised me, don't really like to jeopardize their reputation with the top law schools (I'm thinking here the top 6, of which Columbia and Harvard are 2). 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.

Ajay-p 3y ago

This was not the first. It appears that several attorneys have had job offers rescinded due to comments made regarding the conflict. https://www.nydailynews.com/2023/10/10/nyu-law-student-ryna-workman-lose-job-offer-israel-hamas-comments/ 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.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Davis Polk handled this better: they didn't name the students. (Counterpoint: they're doubling down with any nuance about the difference between advocating for Palestinians and supporting Hamas' tactics added as an afterthought [1].) [1] https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-campus-gaza-war/ https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-c...

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"On Tuesday, the firm said it was reconsidering that decision for two of the three students, who fought their dismissals and said that they did not authorize the letters, which did not have any individual signatories." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/davis-polk-employment-columbia-harvard-israel-palestine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/business/davis-polk-emplo...

TMWNN 3y ago

I'm a First Amendment absolutist who doesn't like what is going on. Winston & Strawn and Davis, Polk & Wardell had decided that the law students qualified for job offers. That the firms decided that the students no longer qualified because of something, not violating the law, that the students are associated with is alarming. 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.)

tguvot 3y ago
ain't under current legal framework in usa what those companies do can be classified as free speech as well ? i remember some cases in past years that classified actions in this way
raxxorraxor 3y ago
True, in a way it is just making the same mistakes of silencing unpopular opinions. I hope these Harvard students stayed way under their potential with a message like this at a time when Israel was invaded. It reflects badly on the education. This was a bit beyond bad taste. Still, effort should be made to widen the discourse again, instead of reiterating bad ideas like "speech has consequences".
matt005 3y ago
[flagged]