Steve Sailer writes: The largest bulk of what lawyers do is write contracts, which are like computer programs written in modern English with much key vocabulary taken from medieval Anglo-French words. Hence, lawyers, like computer coders, need to be hard-working and smart….
Dean Theodore Ruger is particularly enraged that Professor Wax refuses to lie:
* Telling Black student Ayana Lewis L’12, who asked whether Wax agreed with panelist John Derbyshire’s statements that Black people are inherently inferior to white people, that “you can have two plants that grow under the same conditions, and one will just grow higher than the other.” In an interview with Quinn Emanuel, Lewis reported that she felt devastated at being made to feel “not good enough” and like she “had to prove herself.” She explained that in that moment she felt “powerless” to respond to Wax because as a first-year student up against a tenured professor, “I had everything to lose and she had nothing to lose.” As a result, she felt forced to “box in” her feelings and let the moment go “unchecked,” which was incredibly difficult in the face of blatant racism.
• Telling Black student Lauren O’Garro Moore L’12 that she had only become a double Ivy “because of affirmative action.” O’Garro Moore reported to Quinn Emanuel that she was “stunned” and wanted to, but did not let herself, cry because “I have experienced people doubting whether I deserved to be in places where I was, and I’ve learned not to let them recognize that they’ve hurt me.” O’Garro Moore explained that especially as a first-year student, she spent a lot of time questioning whether she knew enough to be at Penn and was in the habit of second-guessing herself, so when Wax told her that, “everything about that really hurt.” O’Garro Moore reported feeling unable to respond to Wax in the moment for fear that if she was not “well- rehearsed” with research to defend herself, Wax would simply poke holes in her statements.
• Telling Jaime Gallen L’12 that Black students don’t perform as well as white students because they are less well prepared, and that they are less well prepared because of affirmative action.
• Emailing Gregory Berry L’10, a Black student, that “[i]f blacks really and sincerely wanted to be equal, they would make a lot of changes in their own conduct and communities.”
• Stating in class that people of color needed to stop acting entitled to remedies, to stop getting pregnant, to get better jobs, and to be more focused on reciprocity.2
• Stating in class that Mexican men are more likely to assault women and remarking such a stereotype was accurate in the same way as “Germans are punctual.”
• Commenting in class that gay couples are not fit to raise children and making other references to LGBTQ people that a student reported evinced a “pattern of homophobia.”
• Commenting after a series of students with foreign-sounding names introduced themselves that one student was “finally, an American” adding, “it’s a good thing, trust me.”
COMMENTS:
* I guess Ms. Wax wants to poke the bear, which is fine. But man, there are ways to answer questions that don’t involve shitting on the person standing in front of you.
* Ruger’s bullet point list of Wax’s alleged statements and offenses reads to me like a typical lefty rallying tactic of decontextualizing these incidents by deliberately omitting anything that the students said or did to provoke Wax into commenting, and then embellishing Wax’s responses by using tactical language that’s intentionally inserted to trigger moral outrage and sympathies.
By the way, all my life I’ve felt that I “had to prove myself” and work harder to overcome any doubters or critics. It tends to push me to reach my potential and gives purpose to continual self-improvement.
* These antiquarian decade-old allegations made me wonder “Where are they now.” I just now checked Lauren O’Garro-Moore in LinkedIn. She lasted all of 2 years 8 months at a law firm in New York, seemingly wasn’t invited to partner, then took a job as an administrator at a private secondary school, and then moved to another one.
New York law firms use these black Ivy grads as glorified paralegals to count towards the “diversity billing” quotas required by clients like WalMart, then part ways.
So I guess her story is that Wax so psychologically damaged her that she couldn’t hack it as a lawyer, whereas had she not come into contact with Wax she’d be on the Supreme Court now.
* while the firm trumpets diversity, what is not mentioned is that almost none of its diverse associates ever make partner – when it comes to cold, hard business decisions, even the nominally woke firm cannot bring itself to ignore actual on the job performance.
* Every big firm needs a certain amount of “cannon meat” to read volumes of discovery documents and so on. The very best people would be bored out of their mind doing such work so it’s good to get some who would find this work reasonably challenging.
* Doc review increasingly automated with AI or outsourced.
* The fears of retaliation or harm by Wax are bizarre, considering the fact that Law School Exams are blind graded.
* That work can also be done by good paralegals…An associate who can’t write or work 14 hours a day won’t last long at a big firm unless she’s sleeping with one of the partners…
* Elite law schools don’t teach the bar since their students are smart enough to learn it on their own but AA students will struggle since they need more direct instruction and will fail multiple times.
* It’s boring at the highest level too. A gal I knew, senior partner at a giant firm, would sit and read 100-page contracts, alert like a cheetah hunting antelopes, to whether a phrase on page 80 could be construed by a court to be fighting with a phrase that she had read on page 20, hours ago.
It used to be that the affirmative-action hire (in not only law) was peacefully resigned to doing perfunctory work. The grand bargain was you take the good salary and be cheerful as you do your perfunctory work. This has broken down. Cheerful has been replaced by uppity; I not only want to do hi-level work, but also, man, I don’t want to parse 100-page contracts, I want to kick back with my feet up on the desk and do cool stuff like on TV.
* Women in general and women of diversity in particular let their neuroses convince them that everyone is out to get them and that the mundane facts of life (like not being as smart or as talented as someone else) are in fact the traumatic outgrowths of vast conspiracies against them. The fact of the matter is that first year in law school is difficult. The professors are trying to put you in your place and the other students are relentlessly trying to finish at the top of the class en route to an AmLaw 100 career or a clerkship. For most people it is the first time in their life that they have actually been challenged, as the undergrad feeder programs (the humanities) are completely devoid of rigor and competition. No one is trying to write “the best” English paper. Thus, if you catch yourself saying “maybe I don’t belong here,” then chances are good that you don’t.
Also, Steve, you’re wrong as to what most attorneys do, which is simply paper pushing and low level litigation. What you mean to say is most of what TOP attorneys do is contracts, which is lucrative, tedious, boring, and yes, incredibly difficult to excel in.
* Wax is a dinosaur from a previous generation. She felt protected by the strong traditions of academic freedom and tenure, but she may find out the hard way that these protections are not as strong as she thought. No young Jewish law professor desiring to achieve tenure today would dare to what Wax did, nor given the indoctrination of the last 30 years, would they probably want to. If they succeed in defenestrating Wax, that will apply doubly, even to Jews who are already tenured. In any case, secular Jews like Wax are in the process of extincting themselves. She and her MD Jewish husband will take their combined 300 Ashkenazi IQ points to the grave because they have no children.
* I read contracts like that all the time and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I think it’s the greatest job in the world.
When I was a youth I would don rubber boots to slog thru the 6″ deep chicken shit in order to collect the eggs from the nests. (In the winter chicken shit has the consistency of … shit. In the summer it dries and becomes dusty so that powdered shit hangs in the air.) I would do this now and then but my father did it every day for decades, 365 days/year (chickens do not observe Juneteeth or any other holiday). Now THAT was a shitty job.
Now I sit at a desk in an air conditioned office and read and type for which I am paid many X more per hour than people who are digging ditches and so on – a Martian would think that the ditch digger should get more.
So anyone who complains about this work doesn’t really know what work is. In any case, I view it as a form of intellectual combat like a chess game. Actually kind of like correspondence chess because it usually proceeds in slow motion.
* This is why I prefer to pay my lawyers and could never do it myself. I can’t read a contract to save my life – way too boring and tedious – but we have a partner at a sky-high expensive law firm in downtown Houston who is amazing at parsing language. Worth every penny in my mind.
Also, my wife is a patent attorney in private practice and most of what she does is licensing deals. My eyes glaze over just listening to her phone calls with her clients.
My understanding is that a lot of lawyers also find it tedious and boring and hard to stay focused and that’s why Ritalin and Adderall are so heavily abused in the profession.
* I hear all the time that whites are (perhaps genetically) inferior to black people when it comes to things like running the 100 meter dash and high jumping and even rhythm and dancing ability. Strangely enough, this does not make me feel “not good enough” or that I have to prove myself by trying to compete in the 100 meter. In fact I recognize that these people probably have a point and that blacks have, by virtual of their isolation from other human populations and different evolutionary history, developed (or did not atrophy) certain traits that are different and in some instances superior to whites on average.
For example, here is the current world champion high jumper who is able to jump clear over a bar held 8 feet in the air (the height of the ceiling in an average room). There is no amount of practice that would allow me to do that. I am never going to have his legs, which were granted to him at birth as a gift from his ancestors. I do not curse or envy blacks for having these gifts, even when they spike the football in the endzone. Some things just are the way that they are and we are in fact powerless to change them (because they are beyond our human capacity to change them) and from that powerlessness we should draw acceptance and not anger.
