In 1920, Lydia C. Chamberlain, a woman from Des Moines who moved to Manhattan, donated her $500,000 estate to create a fellowship at Columbia University. The fellowship had a few restrictions. Notably, recipients were not allowed to study “law, medicine, dentistry, veterinary surgery or theology.” Ha. Seems reasonable. Oh, and the recipients had to be from Iowa and had to move back to Iowa after completing their studies.
This kind of dead-hand control should really not be allowed in our modern, global society, but that’s not why the “Lydia C. Roberts graduate and traveling fellowships” is making news today. It’s making news because the other restriction is that recipients of the fellowship have to be white. “Of the Caucasian race” is the exact formulation.
This isn’t just a story about racism, it’s a story about institutional advantages white people have that some of them pretend to not even be aware of…
Can you imagine only having to listen to black people for 11 minutes for your entire year?
At what point do the Supreme Court’s views on racial equality and tolerance become entirely illegitimate?
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the only black people the nine justices know are characters they’ve seen in Tyler Perry movies. Sorry… characters the justices have seen in previews for Tyler Perry movies.
The Huffington Post has a damning report on the number of minorities who have even had the opportunity to argue in front of the Supreme Court this Term. It’s embarrassing. But in a couple of days or weeks, these nine people are going to presume to tell me whether or not we’ve achieved enough racial equality to do away with affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act?
It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable that these nine people think there is any person of color who should respect them worth a damn…
I don’t want to give a lot of burn to this story today, because sadly it is not news when a “Republican” Supreme Court justice takes a shot at the president of the United States. Conservative justices are just allowed to say crappy things about the president — this president — with everybody just accepting their partiality without calling for recusals. And depending on who gets to write what in Fisher, we’re going to have another opportunity to talk about Clarence Thomas’s ongoing jihad against black people in America who are not like him.
But we do have to at least mention Thomas’s latest slam at black people. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Justice Thomas suggested that Obama only got to be president because he was a black man who said things “approved” by the media and elites.
Funny, I’d think that talking about his long dong silver would be exactly the kind of thing elites expected to hear from a black man.
What’s really happening is that Thomas continues to think that people hate him because he’s a black conservative, when really people hate him because he’s a black a**hole…
* It’s springtime, and the nation’s highest court is getting ready to drop some of its biggest decisions yet. If Tolkien had written this, Justice Kennedy would be the one to bear the One Vote. [UPI]
* But for SCOTUS to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the people, its justices must do battle against a “modern-day tsunami of special interests.” How well are they doing? [National Law Journal]
* To answer that question, let’s look at their record. Political labels aside, thus far, the Roberts court has shaped up to be “the most pro-business court since the mid-1930s.” [New York Times]
* Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has been busy taking shots at President Obama, noting that he always knew the first black president had to be pre-screened by “the elites” and “the media.” [Mother Jones]
* Sometimes even federal prosecutors are willing to take pity upon rich old white men: Mel Weiss, formerly of Milberg LLP, won’t be returning to jail after his foray into DUI territory. [Am Law Daily]
* “Chevron can afford to litigate this case ‘until hell freezes over.’ But [Steven] Donziger can’t.” As it turns out, clients who can’t pay their bills are problematic for John Keker of Keker & Van Nest. [Reuters]
* Eugene Volokh analyzes the free-speech issues raised by the prosecution of Anya Bargh, the UConn law student accused of sending anti-Semitic and racist emails. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Lawyerist thinks you suck, not the gunners. Discuss. [Lawyerist]
* Law and the Multiverse now has CLE courses about comic books. Maintaining this license just got that much easier. [Law and the Multiverse]
* Some new developments in the Ed O’Bannon case against the NCAA. Basically, discovery has not been kind to the NCAA. [Bloomberg]
* All the editors-in-chief at Michigan Law are women. Now, if another 90 or so journals follow suit, Staci’s article will seem outdated. [Michigan Law]
* Ruh-roh. Did David Boies blow the lid off campaign spending limits last cycle? [Huffington Post]
* No, Mike Bloomberg was not denied a slice of pizza yesterday. [Gawker]
* WARNING: If you understand math, the latest from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly will annoy the hell out of you. [PrawfsBlawg]
* Man injured in a drunken fight sues the bar that he says should have cut him off. [Overlawyered]
* “It’s a fine line society walks in trying to be fair.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke earlier this week on the perils of racial profiling with respect to the Chechen suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. Were we fair here? [Associated Press]
* What keeps in-house counsel awake at night — aside from the tremendous piles of money they’re rolling around in? Apparently they’re expecting an “onslaught” of food labeling and data breach class actions. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]
* Susan Westerberg Prager, known for being the longest-serving dean ever at UCLA School of Law, will take up the deanship at another illustrious institution, Southwestern Law School. [National Law Journal]
* The February results for the New York bar exam are out, and with the highest number of test-takers ever, the pass rate was brutal. We may have more on this later. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]
* Rhode Island just got a little more fabulous. The Ocean State legalized gay marriage yesterday, making it the tenth state to do so, and uniting New England in marriage equality for all. [Bloomberg]
* Back in December, we told you about an alleged “well-dressed” groper — an unemployed lawyer, as it were. Well, now there’s nothing alleged about it, because that guy just pleaded guilty. [New York Post]
* The New York Post responds to critics of its Boston attack coverage. [The Onion]
* I’m just going to quote our tipster on this one because I cannot improve upon his commentary: “Because we should publicize every time a Donald Trump lawsuit fails.” [Chronicle of Higher Education]
* DOUBLE F**KING NEWSFLASH: this pissed off sorority girl will write the BEST cease and desist letters someday. [Gawker]
* The Supreme Court stands up to warrantless searches. Sort of. [Simple Justice]
* Sports franchise owners totally rip off the communities they supposedly serve? [Lawyers, Guns & Money]
* You’d think an intellectual property firm would know better than to commit copyright violations. [Law 360]
* Good news, law students! You can get a casebook for the low, low price of $200! [PrawfsBlawg]
* Rachel Ray sued for negligence in trying to help a teen lose weight. If the goal was weight loss, Rachel should have just forced the girl to exclusively eat from Rachel Ray’s cookbook. Nothing can turn someone off eating like that. [US Weekly]
This is the problem with allowing only one black person into your little club, be it your country club, your journalistic publication, or your Supreme Court. When you have only one black voice, the brilliant diversity of thought and opinion within the black community can be reduced to Samuel L. Jackson playing Steven, over-laughing and telling you exactly what you want to hear.
Or it can be reduced to one dude on a revenge jihad.
Regardless, if you are only going to let one black person in, it kind of matters who you let in. And that’s why so many people who believe in the advancement of civil rights have such a visceral, negative reaction to Clarence Thomas. It’s not because Thomas isn’t “black enough.” It’s not because he’s a “sell out.” Those are stupid terms that don’t really apply to Thomas anyway.
The problem with Thomas is that despite being the lone black voice in the institution of government that is best positioned to protect minority rights against the vagaries of majority rule, Thomas’s approach to racial justice can best be summed up as, “I got mine, screw the next generation.” The man is so unable to overcome the racism visited upon him that he holds the perverse view that laws that help minorities magically hobble them. Yet he’ll allow majority rule to hobble black people as they see fit. He thinks that the law singles out people as different, as opposed to the somewhat self-evident truth that people define others as different, and then use those distinctions to discriminate. He was hurt by white people thinking that he only got somewhere “because of affirmative action,” but instead of just dealing with it, he now seeks to block the path for others to follow in his footsteps.
Thomas might not want to be a “minority leader,” but he is by simple fact of his important position. Don’t take my word for it, take Justice Scalia’s. Personally, I think that Scalia is more than capable of coming up with his racist BS on his own, but the man just blamed praised Thomas for “leading” his thoughts down a more asinine path.
But it shows why it matters so much who you let in when you only let in one. And it shows why Thomas has been such a colossal failure as a successor to Thurgood Marshall….
* Awesome event last night in Houston. Met tons of great readers and am looking forward to another trip to visit you all. Thanks to Hearsay Gastro Lounge for hosting us! [Hearsay Gastro Lounge]
* And for those who weren’t there, we introduced our new sibling blog, Breaking Energy. So check it out if you’re interested in coverage of the energy sector. If you’re not following the energy sector, you are missing the future. [Breaking Energy]
* By the way, “Accidental Racist” was TOTALLY ON PURPOSE RACIST. [Thought Catalog]
* Should you take a document review job? My quibble with this post is the stance that some people don’t love contracting for document review. I know TONS of folks who have opted for these gigs so they can travel, raise a family, etc. [Constitutional Daily]
* “Vagueness in legal threats is the hallmark of meritless thuggery.” Y U Hate Biglaw? [Popehat]
* Really interesting follow-up on Reinvent Law. I have no joke here. It’s just interesting, so get off my back. [Adam Smith, Esq.]
* The fastest way to my heart is a compliment. And the best part of this job is that I can’t get a big head because the commenters keep me grounded by hurling invective at least two to one for each compliment. [Law and More]
This is a humdinger of an article. Harrison Barnes, the Malibu-based CEO of BCG Attorney Search (and its various affiliated companies like LawCrossing and EmploymentCrossing), has penned what can only be described as a diatribe in which he viciously mocks various employees he’s hired for their rank incompetence and embarrassing foibles.
He also elects to exhibit a panoply of racist, sexist, ageist, and ethnophobic attitudes along the way. It’s a stunning degree of openness for someone involved in the human resources business.
But the unintentional comedy throughout the piece is the realization that a recruiter is functionally admitting that he has no idea how hiring works.
In a land that is right here and in a time that is right now, a technology has arisen so powerful that it can replace basic human document review. Is it time to bow down before our new robot overlords?
First, here’s a little story about me: my life in the legal world began as a paralegal. My first case was a GIANT patent infringement case that was already six years old and had involved as many as five companies, multiple US courts, the ITC and an international standards committee. I knew nothing about any of this.
On my first day, my supervisor (a paralegal with at least eight other cases driving her crazy) sat me down in front of a Concordance database with a 100,000+ patents and patent file histories. “Code these,” she said. I learned that “coding”, for the purposes of this exercise, meant manually typing the inventor’s name, the title of the patent, the assignee, the file date, and other objective data for each document. I worked on that project – and only that project – for at least the first six months of my job. After a week or so, time began to blur.
What I know, in retrospect and with absolutely certainty, is that as time began to blur, so did my judgment. So did my attention to detail. If you could tell me that I did not make at least one mistake a day – one inconsistent spelling, one reversed day and month, one incorrectly spaced title – I frankly would need to see your evidence. I would not believe it. The human mind is trainable but it is not a machine.
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