Big Law cowardice calls legal licensure into question

The WAMU podcast 1A put on an excellent show Monday on the White House threats against law firms.

The show featured Princeton University Professor Deborah Pearlstein, Politico reporter Josh Gerstein, and Elias Law Group Chair Marc Elias.

Highlights for me:

• Pearlstein questioned the ethics of the firms that have caved to Administration pressure. How can a client trust Paul Weiss to provide zealous representation, she asked, when the firm so readily caves to political pressure?
• Elias called the deals struck by Paul Weiss and Skadden, inter alia and respectively $40 million and $100 million payoffs in legal services, "cowardly" and "obscene" and questioned whether the practice of law should continue to be protected by the exclusivity of licensing.

Agreed and agreed. I suggest moreover that the weakness of the legal profession and its willingness to sell out for the bottom line has been the American way already for decades. That Big Law has locked down the profession and lobbies anti-competitively to keep it that way—thereby denying access to legal services, legal education, and legal careers to ordinary Americans, while building and bolstering an anti-democratic corporatocracy—is nothing new to those of us who toil away on the hamster wheels beneath the status ceiling.

It's simply Trump's shameless gambit that has exposed the rot.

In the less cowardly vein, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale (Court Listener), and Jenner & Block (Court Listener) are litigating against the executive orders targeting law firms. I anticipate signing on to an amicus brief of law professors in support of the plaintiff motion for summary judgment in the Perkins Coie matter in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Update, Apr. 3: Law Professors' Amicus Brief in Perkins Coie v. DOJ (D.D.C. filed Apr. 3, 2025).

Rule of law seems absent, western powers impassive, as civil war inflicts horrific suffering in Sudan

I know it's hipster hot right now to be up in arms over Gaza and lukewarm over Ukraine. I'd like for a moment to set aside both those conflicts and ask for your consideration of Sudan.

I've written previously about Sudan, from the time of development optimism that was dashed and broken by catastrophic civil war. I was enamored of the country and its people upon visiting there in 2020, and I watched the war unfold with profound sadness.

The war in Sudan rages on, so long since its April 2023 eruption that even I back-burnered it among my conscious anxieties in recent months. It was brought to the front again when I read a Friday story from NPR: Why Sudan Is Being Called a "Humanitarian Desert," by Fatma Tanis.

The story relates a report from Doctors Without Borders: "The report states that bombing and shelling of civilian areas killed thousands of people, including women and children. Civilians were consistently attacked and killed by armed groups in their own homes, at checkpoints, along displacement routes and even in hospitals and clinics."

Horrifyingly, "'a characteristic feature' of the war, the report states ... that women and girls were raped in their homes and along displacement routes. Of 135 survivors of sexual violence who were interviewed by MSF, 40% said they were assaulted by multiple attackers."

Democrats and (too many) Republicans disagree over support of Ukraine. The Republican platform specifically references Israel, and Ukraine's omission is contentiously purposive. The draft Democrat platform for 2024 mentions Israel, Ukraine, and Sudan. American involvement in the latter context looks limited to the present "Special Envoy," charged with making peace, along with a more nebulous commitment to support Africa in solving its own problems. 

I'm reminded of an exercise in university journalism class in which we examined the newspaper column-inches (these were the days of actual newspapers) afforded to global crisis reporting to witness the greater-than-linear, inverse relationship with distance from the United States. Yet, as one might have noted then, too, Khartoum is not that much farther from Washington than Tel Aviv and Kyiv.

Is our commitment to the people of Sudan sufficient? I don't purport to know what the policy of "the most developed nations" should be concerning civil war in Sudan. I do worry that prioritizing international conflicts based on strategic imperatives while paying little more than lip service to our values sends the wrong message to aggressors in a world in which nations, including the United States, are ever more inextricably interdependent.

Oops. We accidentally linked healthcare to your job.

mohamed_hassan (pixabay.com)

I stand with the rest of the world in awestruck horror of America's stubborn insistence that access to healthcare should be a function of both one's wealth and the largesse of one's employer.

Critics of the free market are quick to conclude that it has failed the American worker.  Economic libertarians are just as quick to tout the essentiality of free contract.  Before we make any decisions about the free labor market, maybe we should try it out.  A market in which a worker can't change jobs for fear of a recurring cancer or a bankrupting accident is not a free labor market.

For the NPR podcast Throughline, Lawrence Wu set out recently to explain how we arrived at the problem of employer-dependent healthcare.  The description of the episode, "The Everlasting Problem" (Oct. 1, 2020), reads:

Health insurance for millions of Americans is dependent on their jobs. But it's not like that everywhere. So, how did the U.S. end up with such a fragile system that leaves so many vulnerable or with no health insurance at all? On this episode, how a temporary solution created an everlasting problem.

For This American Life and Planet Money, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson also addressed this subject back in 2009.  Their bit ran only 11 minutes, but I have never forgotten the shocking fact that "four accidental steps led to enacting the very questionable system of employers paying for health care."

'Hidden Brain' tackles Ford Pinto product liability, hindsight bias, inevitable accident

Classic yellow Ford Pinto
(Michael Dorausch CC BY-SA 2.0)

In a two-for-one bonus for torts teachers, Shankar Vedantam at National Public Radio analyzed the Ford Pinto product liability case to the end of understanding hindsight bias and inevitable accident in his podcast, Hidden Brain.  The item includes an interview with Denny Giola, a Ford decision-maker who raised concerns about the Pinto, but at a crucial decision point, voted against recall.

The story is Shankar Vedantam, Cat Schuknecht, Tara Boyle, Rhaina Cohen, & Parth Shah, The Halo Effect: Why It's So Difficult To Understand The Past, Hidden Brain, Sept. 21, 2020.  A real-life Pinto anchors a featured case exhibit at the American Museum of Tort Law.