But maybe these students are the toxic ones, honing techniques they will use in the workplace to silence, intimidate, slander, and ruin other people.
As Nate Hochman detailed in his on-the-ground reports from Georgetown Law yesterday and today, left-wing law students are making a performative show of being emotionally traumatized to the point of uncontrollable tears by a poorly worded phrase in one of Ilya Shapiro’s tweets. Their confrontation with Georgetown’s noodle-spined deans during yesterday’s sit-in produced this gem:
A student demanded that the dean cover for the classes that the activists had missed as a result of the sit-in, suggesting that the move should be part of a “reparations” package for black students. She followed up by insisting that students be given a designated place on campus to cry. “Is there an office they can go to?” she asked. “I don’t know what it would look like, but if they want to cry, if they need to break down, where can they go? Because we’re at a point where students are coming out of class to go to the bathroom to cry.” “And this is not in the future,” she added. “This is today.”
The people airing these sentiments have no business becoming lawyers.
First of all, of course, they are failing basic reading comprehension, which is an important skill in the law. Shapiro simply argued that a racially and gender-discriminatory criterion for selecting a Supreme Court justice — a criterion that excludes some 97 percent of the potential candidates, including the person he personally considered the best-qualified candidate — was likely to produce a less-qualified justice. Of course, practicing lawyers twist the meaning of other people’s words to the breaking point of plausibility all the time, and while this is not an ethical thing to do, I could not honestly claim that it is not a frequently successful tactic.
But it is not just that these law students are arguing for an unreasonable meaning of Shapiro’s words; they are claiming to be so personally traumatized by those words that they need a special room to go cry in. That is not just dishonest, it is insane. Real lawyers need a much thicker skin than that when confronting unpleasant words and alien points of view. They need the ability to read and fairly digest the words of people with drastically different perspectives than their own. They also need the capacity to stretch their own minds to persuade other people — judges, juries, the other side in a negotiation — who may come from different perspectives and see things differently. Like it or not, judges from Federalist Society backgrounds and perspectives are going to be in a lot of courtrooms; Trump voters are going to be on a lot of juries. If you are wholly incapable of reading things in anything but the most bizarrely uncharitable left-wing way (here, the preposterous claim that Shapiro was somehow describing all black women as “lesser”) and you then take that one meaning so personally that you need a designated crying area . . . well, that’s not a frame of mind that is designed for the rough-and-tumble of lawyering.
Which brings us to the question of how we should interpret these sorts of histrionics, including the Georgetown students’ additional demand that the law school insulate them from criticism while they engage in character assassination.
One way of reading this stuff is to take the law students literally. If they are taken literally, these law students are just far too emotionally fragile for the practice of law. Law is a hard business. Even if one avoids the toxic workplace cultures that are all too common in the law, lawyers in almost any field face long working hours, intense time pressures, high stakes, and demanding clients. Some areas of the law are especially emotionally draining: Prosecutors must deal with victims of traumatic crimes, criminal-defense lawyers must handle people facing long jail sentences, family lawyers are constantly in the midst of divorces and custody fights. Many areas of the law involve daily exposure to people the lawyer has no power to control and who can make your life hell: clients, judges, opposing counsel, witnesses, regulatory agencies, even people on your own side. I spent two decades practicing one of the more comparatively courtly areas of law (mainly securities class actions) in a generally collegial workplace, and I’ve still seen all sorts of hard things — all-nighters, abusive opposing counsel, snide judges, a client in tears at his acquittal by a jury, a pro bono client being deported, a conference call where one of our clients was browbeating some of our other clients. Every lawyer has stories, and in the moment, you need to keep some measure of an even keel. If you can’t take the heat, you’re in the wrong business. Trial lawyers don’t get to ask the judge to stop a trial so they can go cry.
Or perhaps, instead of taking these students literally, we should take them seriously. Worse is the likelihood that a lot of this apparent snowflakery is not actual emotional fragility, but deliberate emotional manipulation. Michael Brendan Dougherty has explained during a prior elite-law-school controversy how this works:
At first glance, the injured students appear to be classic snowflakes. . . . Instead of building character we build massive bureaucracies to deal with all the complaints that we’ve taught young people to emit at the first sign of discomfort, which they conflate with peril. . . .
The law students involved are not so fragile. The withdrawal of good faith to the email’s author was deliberate. These “snowflakes” did somehow manage to survive the meritocratic gauntlet leading to Yale Law School, after all. Indeed, it’s notable that most so-called snowflakes accumulate not in society’s quiet valleys where we might expect to find gentler souls genuinely struggling to cope with conflict, but rather atop the peaks of elite institutions to which our most aggressive strivers have clawed their way. These students seem less concerned with their safety than with inflicting damage against potential rivals. Yale Federalist Society members rise to places like the Supreme Court, and an official complaint entered or reprimand elicited now may be political fodder later. . . .
In a society where safety is the highest value, people will discover that asserting a claim of unsafety is the most effective way to coopt institutional and state power. Authorities will not only gravitate toward actions that minimize risk, but also run away from making decisions of their own lest the power of victimhood be turned on them.
If this is the case, then these law students are not hothouse flowers too fragile to survive contact with the toxic people and situations that litter the legal profession; they are the toxic ones, the abusers and manipulators who are honing techniques that they will use in the workplace and the courtroom to silence, to intimidate, to berate, to slander, and to ruin other people. That is no way to use the power of a law license.
Either way, any organization that hires law students who act in this manner is either committing organizational suicide, deliberately arming itself with weapons to harm other people, or (most likely) both. And the deans of Georgetown Law, who are supposed to be not only adults but educators, are cultivating this kind of behavior.