Courts

It Will Be Harder To Hold People Like ‘The Wig Ripper’ Accountable Once This Court Has Its Way

You think his firm would have responded as quickly if there weren't anti-discrimination laws with teeth on the books?

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lady-justice-g92f671a98_1920It is very easy to get the feeling that the legal industry is an old boys’ club. It especially doesn’t help when you hear a bunch of 3rd or 4th generations talking about how they got an associate position at a white shoe firm while you’re stuck trying to figure out what all the industry jargon still means. One of the things about old boys’ clubs is that there are uplifted traditions that are usually maintained by others having to bear the weight of them. For example, you can have all the panels about how hate speech is good for democracy all you want, but as soon as someone gives a graduation speech in favor of Palestine and against the police, those same people try to get a school’s funding pulled over hate speech.

We are at a turning point — somewhere around the eve of affirmative action being overturned. Several anti-discriminatory laws actually, 303 Creative and the coming cases like it, will drive wedges between protections minorities once had and the ones they no longer will. And with them, unless there are some cultural or legal measures taken to prevent it, the legal environment is likely to slip backward toward the days when you could harass and exclude whomever you wanted. While the risk of those abuses has never left, they’ve been far less brazen. If the wig-snatching incident involving former Leader Berkon Colao and Silverstein LLP employee Anthony P. Orlich happened just a couple of years ago, the response probably would have been that what attorneys do off the clock is their own business. Sure, there would have been an understanding that the firm owns your weekdays and weekends, but as accountable as burnout culture is to firms and partners, not much was really expected of employee accountability toward non-clients. Today, some work emails of partners brazenly discriminating against women, minorities, Jews, and the LGBTQ community results in them stepping down from a freshly minted firm. Will that same social pressure exist in a couple of years from now? Based on which laws? Do you really think a court that has upheld racial gerrymandering and dismantled affirmative action will really care that much about discrimination cases once even more civil liberties have been rolled back?

It is one thing to see some asshole try and rip some random person’s wig off like he didn’t learn the elements of battery like the rest of us. And just in case you don’t intuitively know how much force you’d have to do what he did, here is a clear explanation from the person it happened to:

I am thankful that Lizzy Ash was taken seriously and her alleged batterer faced consequences. But it also makes me wonder how often this happens — along with what a world would look like where there were not legal protections in place that penalize discriminating against people in times of need. The end of affirmative action and the start of cases that secure the right to discriminate are about more than college attendance and not having to help gay people plan weddings. It is the end of a legal framework that offers accountability and security to people that would otherwise have been disenfranchised.

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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