Does it matter that big law firms are taking a stand against law school antisemites?

Several big-name law firms were so shocked by the antisemitism they saw at the Ivy League law schools following Hamas’s attack on Israel that they wrote a letter warning the law schools to tamp down on the craziness. I’m unimpressed. They have no excuse for not realizing what’s been going on and I doubt their letter will effect real change at institutions that the left has coopted entirely.

I graduated from law school in the mid-1980s. Back then, we were taught the classical legal canon: common law (that is, judge-made law, a British tradition) and statutory law. All of it fell under the umbrella of the Constitution.

The changes were already coming, though, when I was in law school. While my school was still conservative (although it’s a leftist lunatic house now), the Ivy Leagues were already going crazy.

My rule of thumb as a lawyer—and this was based on the Ivy League attorneys I worked with or opposed during my litigation career—was that any post-1984 Harvard Law grad was not to be trusted. The ones I met, and this was admittedly a limited sampling, simply weren’t ethical and, often, they also weren’t very bright. By the early 1990s, my experiences saw me add all the Ivies to the list of recently graduated untrustworthy attorneys.

Image: The library at Harvard Law School by Tyler Vigen. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Indeed, if you want to know the quintessential Ivy League law school graduates from the late 1980s and early 1990s, look no further than Barack Obama (Harvard Law J.D., 1991) and Michelle Obama (Harvard Law J.D., 1988). They view the Constitution with suspicion and believe that their legal degrees are put to their highest and best use, not to advance justice, but to advance social justice, which is something entirely different.

Just two days after the attack, Zachary Marschall, editor-in-chief at Campus Reform, wrote about the antisemitism that is the norm across American colleges. Law schools aren’t immune. Just this past spring, Fatima Mousa Mohammed used the graduation ceremony at City University of New York School of Law to launch a vile antisemitic attack. It took weeks before any pushback happened. Weeks.

Therefore, I was not at all surprised to see that law school graduates across America came out in favor of Hamas after its soldiers massacred 1,400 Israelis (stopping first to rape as many women as possible, literally raping some to death) and kidnapped over 200 more people, including almost three dozen children, including babies. The fact that this is not only an act of vomitous immorality but also a violation of all international rules of law and warfare was irrelevant to these student activists.

Again, their degrees aren’t about justice, they are about socialist justice, which is something entirely different. (Yes, I know I said a variation of that before; this time it’s for rhetorical emphasis.)

Still, reliably leftist law firms were shocked. I’d like to say that sarcastically because their members have no excuse for their ignorance about the antisemitism in academia, but they seem to have been genuinely surprised. Indeed, some of the big, famous law firms were so surprised that they wrote to the deans at various law schools saying that they would start looking askance at schools that produce these antisemites:

I guess I should be pleased, but I consider this insufficient. Many of these firms are huge Democrat donors and lobbyists, especially Akin Grump Strauss Hauer & Feld, the lead signatory. The second signatory, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, is also a Democrat-connected firm. Same goes for signatory number three, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, one of America’s oldest law firms, which started as a Republican-connected firm founded by William H. Seward.

These firms almost certainly aren’t concerned that the law schools graduate activists who view the Constitution as a racist document, America as a racist country, borders as illegal boundaries restricting the free-flow of welfare seekers into America, white people and men as toxic, etc. They care only about antisemitism.

Well, I care about antisemitism, too. More than that, I care about the leftism and Islamism that carry along antisemitism as just one of many ideas that stand against morality, justice, the Constitution, decency, biological reality, and reality generally.

What I’m betting will happen is that the law schools will tell their students to be more discrete if they want to earn those socialist big bucks. Then, the status quo will return to the system: We’ll again see the pipeline of hardcore, wacko leftists graduating from Ivy League schools and heading for huge firms that use their power and contacts with the federal government to reshape society in decidedly un-democratic (small “d”) ways but, unfortunately, very Democrat (big “D”) ways.

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