Claude says Sep. 1, 2026: <\/p>\n
\nAmy Wax<\/a> appears to have left her strongest Ahmad Almallah comparator out of her own federal complaint. In Wax v. Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania<\/em><\/a>, decided August 27, 2025<\/a>, Judge Timothy J. Savage<\/a>, Senior United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, rejected Almallah as a comparator because Wax had pleaded one relevant fact about him, his participation in an October 2023 rally. Savage emphasized what was missing. Wax had not alleged that Almallah or her other proposed comparators repeatedly made harmful statements about members of the university community, engaged in a comparable pattern of conduct, or accumulated anything resembling Wax\u2019s disciplinary history.<\/p>\n
But by the time Wax filed her federal lawsuit in January 2025, a more relevant allegation against Almallah had been public for more than a year. The original December 5, 2023 complaint in Yakoby v. University of Pennsylvania<\/em><\/a> alleged that a Jewish Penn student who took a course from Almallah in fall 2022 was singled out during a dispute over Israel and the West Bank barrier. According to the complaint, after the student defended the barrier, Almallah and other students confronted her for approximately thirty minutes. She later complained to Penn.<\/p>\n
The March 2024 amended complaint<\/a> supplied considerably more detail. It alleged that the student, identified as SAA Member #1, was a Jewish Penn alumna majoring in Modern Middle East Studies, that Almallah knew she was Jewish and had family in Israel, that he repeatedly singled her out, and that she contacted Penn professor Al Filreis seeking an urgent meeting about what had happened. These remain litigation allegations rather than established facts. They describe the sort of student-facing conduct missing from Wax\u2019s allegations about her comparators.<\/p>\n
Wax had a second chance to plead it. The docket in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania<\/a> shows she filed an amended complaint on March 3, 2025, more than a year after the Yakoby<\/em> amendment. The classroom allegation still did not appear.<\/p>\n
The allegations later acquired additional legal significance. In June 2025, Judge Mitchell Goldberg\u2019s Yakoby<\/em> opinion<\/a> recited allegations concerning antisemitic incidents involving individual members of Students Against Antisemitism and concluded that the organization had adequately pleaded associational standing. Goldberg did not find that the underlying accusations against Almallah or other faculty members were true. The allegations are evidence of what had been publicly alleged, communicated to Penn, and placed into federal litigation. They are not proof that the alleged conduct occurred as described.<\/p>\n
Yet Wax\u2019s January 2025 verified complaint<\/a> relied on Almallah\u2019s rally speech. Wax alleged that Almallah participated in a rally where \u201cintifada revolution\u201d was chanted and argued that Penn\u2019s failure to discipline him demonstrated selective enforcement. Her lawyers had made the same argument in a pre-suit letter to Penn<\/a> that named Almallah, the Annenberg lecturer Dwayne Booth, and the English and cinema studies professor Julia Alekseyeva. That was a weaker comparator allegation for the purpose Savage applied. The Yakoby<\/em> allegations describe a Penn instructor, a student in his classroom, an extended confrontation connected to the student\u2019s identity-linked position on Israel, and a subsequent complaint to Penn personnel.<\/p>\n
Savage may still have decided the comparator issue correctly. Almallah differs from Wax in another significant respect. Penn\u2019s current English Department faculty directory<\/a> classifies Ahmad Almallah as non-standing faculty, whereas Wax holds a tenured chair on Penn\u2019s standing faculty<\/a>. The classroom account also remains contested litigation material. But if the question is whether Penn treated politically charged faculty conduct consistently, rather than whether Wax satisfied the technical comparator requirements of federal employment-discrimination law, Almallah becomes far more important. His Penn faculty page<\/a> lists him as teaching ENGL 3010 in fall 2026. That does not establish that Penn never investigated, warned, or reprimanded him privately. It establishes that the alleged episode did not terminate his teaching relationship with Penn.<\/p>\n
Huda Fakhreddine supplies the half of the comparison Almallah lacks. A January 9, 2026 Third Circuit opinion in Fakhreddine v. University of Pennsylvania<\/em><\/a> identifies her as a tenured Penn professor of Arabic literature, a far stronger employment-status comparator to Wax than Almallah or Booth. Penn\u2019s Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures department<\/a> lists her as an associate professor. The opinion also records the public statements that later became the subject of congressional scrutiny. Fakhreddine wrote on October 7, 2023 that \u201cwhile we were asleep, Palestine invented a new way of life.\u201d The opinion recounts that at an October 16 rally she made additional statements about Israel and antisemitism and applauded another speaker whose remarks included telling Jews to return to various places, including Berlin. These characterizations do not come from Wax\u2019s lawsuit. They appear in the factual history recited by the Third Circuit in Fakhreddine\u2019s own litigation against Penn.<\/p>\n
Fakhreddine also presents a student-facing allegation. The Yakoby<\/em> amended complaint<\/a> alleged that students in Arabic courses were required to attend portions of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival<\/a>, held on Penn\u2019s campus in September 2023, and alleged that Fakhreddine told her students attendance was mandatory. Judge Goldberg later summarized the complaint as alleging that Fakhreddine and Abdulrahman Atta required Jewish members of Students Against Antisemitism to attend the festival and penalized students who did not.<\/p>\n
That allegation belongs alongside the materially different account offered by the Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors<\/a>. The AAUP chapter said students in some courses were required to attend a specified number of cultural events during the semester, could choose which part of Palestine Writes to attend, and could receive alternative assignments if they objected. The competing accounts make Fakhreddine more useful as a case study. They allow the allegation, the defense, and the limits of the public evidence to be separated instead of treating disputed accusations as established fact.<\/p>\n
The resulting comparison goes beyond a claim that Penn protects one political coalition and punishes another. Almallah supplies the stronger alleged individualized student encounter and weaker employment equivalence, because he is non-standing faculty. Fakhreddine supplies the stronger tenure equivalence and weaker publicly established evidence of individualized mistreatment of a student. Neither reproduces the entire Wax pattern. Nobody yet identified combines tenure, repeated controversial public statements, individualized student-facing allegations, prior administrative warnings, recurrence after notice, and a comparable disciplinary history in a single person. That absence is a finding.<\/p>\n
Dwayne Booth provides a sharper comparison in one respect, because Penn publicly explained why it would protect his speech. In a February 4, 2024 statement<\/a>, Interim President J. Larry Jameson called the political cartoons that the Annenberg lecturer<\/a> posted on his personal website \u201creprehensible, with antisemitic symbols.\u201d Jameson stressed that the cartoons appeared on a personal website and were not taught in the classroom. He reaffirmed Penn\u2019s commitment to open expression and academic freedom and the right of members of the university community to express views others might find loathsome.<\/p>\n
That statement comes close to announcing a Penn limiting principle: even expression the university president considers reprehensible and antisemitic may remain protected when it is extramural and lacks a classroom nexus. Booth counts because Penn itself named the fact that protected him. The cartoons were outside the classroom.<\/p>\n
Penn described Wax\u2019s case very differently. Its September 24, 2024 final determination<\/a> said the Faculty Hearing Board found that Wax had engaged in \u201cflagrant unprofessional conduct\u201d that denied students equal educational opportunity. Penn cited a history of sweeping derogatory generalizations about groups, her disclosure and continued discussion of student grades by race after being cautioned about confidentiality, and discriminatory or disparaging statements made inside the classroom, outside it, and in public. Penn\u2019s theory was cumulative. It aggregated extramural speech with classroom behavior, student-related conduct, prior warnings, and the effect Penn believed the total pattern had on students\u2019 confidence that Wax would evaluate them impartially.<\/p>\n
The Booth comparison then acquires two further complications. First, Penn protected him under pressure. The Daily Pennsylvanian<\/em> reported in September 2025<\/a> that documents concerning Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro\u2019s representative at Penn, Robert Fox, showed Fox considered Jameson\u2019s defense of Booth inadequate and appeared to advocate Booth\u2019s firing. Jameson and the Annenberg School refrained from firing Booth, who remained at Penn through the end of the 2024-25 academic year. Penn did not capitulate whenever politically powerful people demanded punishment of a left-wing faculty member.<\/p>\n
Second, Booth left anyway. On March 19, 2025, Annenberg Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser told the school\u2019s part-time lecturers that their contracts would not be renewed for 2025-26<\/a>. A school spokesperson cited financial constraints and the termination of three federal grants. Booth told the paper his course had been canceled and blamed university capitulation to political threats over funding. The public record supports two readings and settles neither. A school that pauses every part-time lecturer contract at once has an obvious budgetary explanation available whatever else it wants. Anyone building the comparator case has to hold both possibilities open.<\/p>\n
The harder question is why Penn compartmentalized Booth\u2019s extramural expression while Wax\u2019s extramural expression became part of an aggregated professional-conduct case. Penn has an answer. Booth\u2019s cartoons were not taught in his classroom, while Penn\u2019s case against Wax reached far beyond public commentary. The historical inquiry is whether Penn has applied that distinction consistently when other professors\u2019 public speech becomes entangled with complaints about students or teaching.<\/p>\n
Anthea Butler provides a pre-Wax control, because her controversy arrived before the institutional battle over Wax began. In 2015 Butler wrote on Twitter, \u201cIf only there was a \u2018coon of the year\u2019 award,\u201d during a discussion widely understood to concern Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. Butler disputed the interpretation that she had applied the epithet to Carson. The controversy generated extensive demands that Penn act against her. In a 2016 interview with Billy Penn<\/em><\/a>, Butler said critics had called \u201cevery dean\u201d and the president\u2019s office and routinely contacted Penn demanding that the university get rid of her. She described Penn as supportive of her and emphasized the protection supplied by tenure.<\/p>\n
The Butler comparison has a limit. One inflammatory and disputed tweet about a national political figure does not equal years of Wax statements combined with classroom complaints, student-grade confidentiality issues, repeated warnings, and the finding that students could reasonably question her impartiality. Butler is useful for a narrower proposition. Penn had a tenured professor whose extramural political speech generated national outrage, accusations of racism, and direct complaints to senior administrators. The public record does not show a comparable major-sanction proceeding. Her Penn career advanced. In 2021 Penn appointed Butler to the Geraldine R. Segal Professorship in American Social Thought<\/a>, an endowed chair awarded to a nationally recognized scholar whose interests include human rights, civil liberties, and race relations. Penn\u2019s religious studies department now lists her as emerita<\/a>. Her arc ended in retirement.<\/p>\n
So Butler cuts both ways. She supports the proposition that Penn has historically afforded substantial latitude to offensive extramural expression. She does not by herself demonstrate ideological favoritism, because the conduct was materially less extensive than Wax\u2019s. Butler is a historical baseline.<\/p>\n
The deeper methodological problem lies in the gap between Savage\u2019s legal comparator test and the historical question. Savage applied ordinary employment-discrimination doctrine. To support an inference of discriminatory enforcement, Wax needed people sufficiently similar to her in employment status and misconduct. He therefore emphasized her years of statements, repeated complaints, prior restrictions and warnings, and disciplinary history when explaining why Booth, Almallah, Fakhreddine and the other proposed comparators were not similarly situated.<\/p>\n
That reasoning may be appropriate for deciding whether Wax adequately pleaded a federal discrimination claim. It cannot answer whether Penn created the difference through its own earlier enforcement choices. Prior disciplinary history is partly endogenous to the institution whose consistency is under examination.<\/p>\n
Imagine two professors who commit comparable first acts. Penn warns Professor A and does not warn Professor B. Both later commit another comparable act. Penn now treats A more severely because A has already been warned. Years later, B is rejected as a comparator because B lacks A\u2019s disciplinary history. The legal conclusion follows from conventional comparator doctrine. It leaves untouched the historical question of whether the institution treated equivalent conduct equally at the beginning of the sequence. The apparently neutral distinguishing variable, prior disciplinary history, is partly a product of earlier decisions by Penn.<\/p>\n
Wax\u2019s own sequence shows where her clock starts. On August 9, 2017 she and Larry Alexander published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em><\/a> calling for the restoration of bourgeois cultural norms. The law school compiled the faculty responses on its own website<\/a>, including an open letter from thirty-three of her colleagues. Penn took no disciplinary action. Then a September 2017 video conversation with Brown economist Glenn Loury surfaced, in which Wax described the class rank of Black students in her required first-year course. On March 13, 2018<\/a>, Dean Ted Ruger announced that Wax would no longer teach that course. He said she had spoken disparagingly and inaccurately about student performance and had transgressed the confidentiality of student grades. Ruger described that 2018 removal to the faculty senate chair in 2022<\/a> as the first restriction in a longer escalation.<\/p>\n
Everything Penn later counted as Wax\u2019s disciplinary history begins in those nineteen months. So the comparator question has a location and a date. What did Penn do when another professor reached the same point: one extramural publication that outraged a large part of the faculty, followed within a year by a second incident touching a course and the students in it?<\/p>\n
The better test is therefore longitudinal. The relevant comparison runs stage by stage: Wax\u2019s first controversial extramural statement against another professor\u2019s first controversial extramural statement, her first student complaint against another professor\u2019s first student complaint, her first alleged classroom problem against another professor\u2019s first alleged classroom problem, her first administrative warning against what Penn did when comparable complaints reached administrators, and then repetition after notice against repetition after notice. Only after reconstructing the cases stage by stage does the final difference in sanctions become evidence of anything.<\/p>\n
Penn\u2019s own faculty rules add a complication, because much of the comparison may be invisible. The Faculty Handbook\u2019s sanctions procedure<\/a> distinguishes major sanctions from minor sanctions. Minor sanctions may include private or public letters of reprimand and monitoring of future research, teaching, or student supervision. After a minor sanction, a dean or the provost may publicize the fact. After a major sanction, the president must publish a statement in Almanac<\/em> describing the case and its disposition.<\/p>\n
The absence of a public disciplinary announcement therefore cannot establish that Penn did nothing. Almallah, Fakhreddine, Booth, Butler, or another professor could have received a private warning or minor sanction that never entered the public record. The defensible claim is narrower: no comparable completed major sanction has been identified in the public record for these professors. Wax\u2019s proceeding became public in part because Penn classified and imposed major sanctions, which triggered mandatory publication. Any serious comparator study has to distinguish no public evidence of discipline from no discipline.<\/p>\n
The strongest symmetry test may lie in Penn\u2019s stated rationale for moving against Wax. In his January 18, 2022 statement<\/a>, Ruger said Wax had repeatedly made derogatory public statements about the characteristics and abilities of many people who studied, taught, and worked at Penn. He said complaints asserted that students could not take her classes \u201cwithout a reasonable belief that they are being treated with discriminatory animus.\u201d Those complaints, he said, required a process capable of determining whether Wax\u2019s conduct was adversely affecting her teaching and classroom activities.<\/p>\n
Penn\u2019s final Wax determination<\/a> used similar reasoning. Provost John Jackson wrote that academic freedom should be broad and that teachers must conduct themselves in a manner conveying willingness to assess all students fairly. The Hearing Board, Penn said, had concluded that Wax\u2019s conduct left many students understandably concerned that she could not and would not be an impartial judge of their academic performance.<\/p>\n
That produces a more precise comparator question than asking whether another professor said something equally offensive. Did Penn employ the same inference when students belonging to other identity groups argued that professors\u2019 public political or demographic statements gave them reason to fear biased treatment in class?<\/p>\n
Fakhreddine makes that question difficult. The Third Circuit\u2019s 2026 opinion<\/a> recounts congressional questioning of Penn about whether Jewish students could expect fair treatment from Fakhreddine after her public statements. The argument resembles the rationale Penn treated as decisive in the Wax proceedings: public speech, followed by a claim that students reasonably doubt the professor\u2019s ability to evaluate members of a particular group impartially. That does not establish that Fakhreddine should have been disciplined, nor that the accusations against her were accurate. It establishes a symmetry test that can be investigated using Penn\u2019s own stated logic rather than an outside definition of offensiveness.<\/p>\n
The Almallah allegations raise a related question, because they describe direct interaction with a Jewish student. The public record also shows that Penn did not ignore outside scrutiny of Almallah and Fakhreddine, who are married<\/a> and whose cases have often moved through the university together. The Penn AAUP reported in 2024<\/a> that Penn informed both of them that a congressional committee had requested their curricula vitae, syllabi, course-wide communications, and communications relating to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and Palestine Writes. According to the AAUP account, Penn agreed to provide at least some of those materials. That evidence complicates any claim that Penn regarded allegations against them as beyond institutional concern.<\/p>\n
The Yakoby<\/em> litigation gives this inquiry continuing importance. Judge Goldberg\u2019s June 2, 2025 opinion<\/a> concluded that the plaintiffs had not adequately alleged that Penn acted with the deliberate indifference necessary for their Title VI claim, although he allowed an opportunity to amend parts of the case. His opinion emphasized that Penn had taken numerous steps in response to antisemitism complaints, including creating an action plan, task force, advisory group, and additional security measures. The court rejected the simple picture of a university doing nothing.<\/p>\n
The dispute did not end there. According to a May 27, 2026 report in The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em><\/a>, a Third Circuit panel heard argument over whether the students\u2019 antisemitism case should proceed. Their lawyer argued that Penn\u2019s failures to enforce its rules left students insecure and deprived them of educational opportunities. Penn\u2019s lawyer emphasized the university\u2019s extensive remedial efforts. The panel did not issue a decision at the argument. The appellate fight bears on the Wax comparison because it may further develop the public record concerning what Penn knew, when administrators knew it, what remedies they chose, and how courts characterize the adequacy of those responses.<\/p>\n
Wax\u2019s own case is also unfinished. She filed her opening Third Circuit brief on January 15, 2026<\/a>, arguing that Savage failed to accept her well-pleaded allegations as true on a motion to dismiss. Penn responded on March 18, 2026<\/a> that she had improperly introduced a retaliation theory she never preserved below. The comparator holding may not survive the appeal in its current form, and a reversal would put the same seven names back before a district court on a fuller record.<\/p>\n
The emerging result is more useful than \u201cPenn punishes conservatives and protects progressives.\u201d That proposition is too easy to state and, on the present evidence, too strong to sustain. Savage was right that the seven people Wax named were poor comparators if the question is whether any one of them duplicated her employment status, pattern of speech, student-related conduct, warnings, and accumulated disciplinary history.<\/p>\n
But Savage\u2019s legal analysis leaves the institutional-history question open. Once the cases are decomposed into stages, four comparators become useful for different reasons. Almallah supplies the strongest publicly alleged individualized student encounter, and he lacks Wax\u2019s standing-faculty status. Fakhreddine supplies tenure equivalence and a close parallel over whether public statements could cause students to doubt a professor\u2019s impartiality, and the student-facing allegations against her are disputed and less individualized. Booth supplies Penn\u2019s clearest public statement that even expression it considers reprehensible and antisemitic can remain protected when it is extramural and disconnected from teaching, along with a departure whose cause the public record does not settle. Butler supplies a pre-Wax control showing substantial institutional tolerance for a tenured professor\u2019s inflammatory extramural racial speech despite complaints reaching senior administrators.<\/p>\n
None of them alone proves that standards apply by coalition. Together they give that proposition a serious empirical test. The question is no longer whether another Penn professor can be found saying something appalling. The question is what Penn did at equivalent moments after comparable problems came to its attention. Who received the first warning? Whose public speech was treated as protected extramural expression? When did Penn infer from public statements that students might reasonably fear biased treatment? Which student complaints triggered formal inquiry? Which did not? Which professors were told that repetition would carry consequences? Which forms of teaching or student contact were restricted? And when controversial conduct continued after notice, did Penn escalate in a comparable way?<\/p>\n
That is the comparator investigation capable of making or breaking the coalition thesis. It replaces anecdotal outrage with a sequence of institutional decisions. If the cases converge once employment status, classroom nexus, student complaints, prior notice, recurrence, and confidentiality violations are held reasonably constant, the selective-enforcement argument weakens. If materially similar conduct repeatedly produces different institutional responses at the same stage of escalation, the claim gets much stronger. Either outcome beats assembling quotations from professors on the opposite side of Amy Wax.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What does the case show about how much Wax is serving as her own lawyer and is that serving her?<\/p>\n
Claude says: <\/p>\n
Wax has counsel of record, including Samantha Harris, who does this work for a living. So the question is not literally whether she filed pro se. It is how much the litigation tracks her own public argument, and there the record says: closely.<\/p>\n
The verified complaint is the tell. Verification is not required in federal court. She swore to the facts personally. That is a party taking ownership of a pleading.<\/p>\n
She named Booth’s blood libel cartoon, Almallah’s rally chant, and Alekseyeva’s remark about the murdered UnitedHealthcare executive. Those are the examples she and her defenders had been using in public for a year. They work in an op-ed. They are vivid, quotable, and morally shocking, and they let the reader feel the asymmetry in a sentence. They are the wrong examples for a comparator pleading, which needs dull similarity in rank, duty, and conduct. The one fact that fit Penn’s own stated theory against her, the alleged Almallah classroom confrontation with a Jewish student who then complained to the administration, had been public since December 2023 and detailed since March 2024. She left it out in January 2025 and left it out again in the March 3, 2025 amendment.<\/p>\n
Savage’s line captures it. He wrote that as much as Wax would like otherwise, this is not a First Amendment case. That is a judge telling a litigant she brought the case she wanted to argue.<\/p>\n
There is a professional irony here. Wax argued fifteen cases in the Supreme Court as an Assistant to the Solicitor General. That is the most prestigious training available, and it is training in taking a record as given and building the strongest argument from it. Her problem in this suit was the opposite kind of problem. Pleading is about choosing which facts to put in front of a court and conceding the ones that hurt. Appellate habit produces a complaint organized around a thesis. Trial habit produces one organized around the elements. She got the first.<\/p>\n
Then she doubled the pattern on appeal. Penn’s March 18, 2026 brief says she introduced a retaliation theory she never preserved below. An appellate specialist knows issue preservation better than almost anyone alive. Doing it anyway suggests the case is being steered by the argument she wants to make rather than by the record she built.<\/p>\n
The order of her two lawsuits points the same way. The federal civil rights claim came first, in January 2025. It carries the thesis. The Montgomery County contract claim came second, in November 2025, after she lost. That one is narrow, procedural, unglamorous, and probably her better claim. Handbook language about what counts as a major infraction is the kind of thing that wins quietly.<\/p>\n
Whether it serves her depends on what she is buying.<\/p>\n
As litigation, it cost her. Savage dismissed the discrimination counts with prejudice and said there was nothing she could add. That is not a pleading defect. That is a judge rejecting the theory.<\/p>\n
As advocacy, the accounting is better than it looks. She is suspended a year at half pay with tenure intact, so she has little to lose in damages. The suit generated a federal opinion that names Booth, Almallah, and Fakhreddine, kept the comparison alive for two more years, and put Penn’s conduct in front of the public. A quiet contract win would have vanished.<\/p>\n
But she paid for that and did not have to. Savage’s opinion is now the authoritative public document about her, and it says she failed to allege facts showing discrimination. Courts get cited. Reporters read holdings. A complaint built stage by stage, starting with the 2017 op-ed and the March 2018 removal and asking what Penn did when other professors reached the same point, would have been both the stronger legal document and the stronger public one. She could have had both artifacts. She chose the one that says what she has been saying.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Based on the court documents, has Wax lost touch with reality?<\/p>\n
Claude says: <\/p>\n
Court filings are adversarial artifacts. They are written to win, they are drafted or at minimum signed by counsel, and they compress a person into a legal theory. Reading a mental state off a complaint is like reading a man’s character off his r\u00e9sum\u00e9. Samantha Harris signed these filings. A lawyer facing Rule 11 exposure does not sign a pleading from someone unmoored. Savage’s language is doctrinal. He said Wax failed to allege facts showing her race was a factor, and that the statutes protect speakers rather than speech. That is a judge rejecting a legal theory. <\/p>\n
There is also affirmative evidence of intact reality-testing in the record. After losing in August 2025, she filed a narrow breach-of-contract suit in Montgomery County built on Faculty Handbook language about what counts as a major infraction. That is a sober, well-calibrated second move by someone who understood she had lost the big one. Her appellate brief argues that the district court failed to take her well-pleaded allegations as true on a motion to dismiss, which is the correct standard and a real argument, whatever its merits here.<\/p>\n
What the record does show is a mismatch between the story she wants told and the test the law applies. She pleaded the examples that persuade an audience rather than the ones that satisfy a comparator analysis. She kept a theory the court had already rejected instead of rebuilding around Penn’s own stated rationale. On appeal she raised a retaliation argument she had not preserved. That pattern has a name, and it is motivated reasoning, which is universal among people who have argued a position in public for years and then find themselves inside a forum with different rules. It is the failure to imagine the adversary’s strongest response. Very intelligent people are worse at this than average, not better, because their fluency lets them talk past the objection.<\/p>\n
Something else may be at work. She might not be trying primarily to win. A federal opinion that names Booth, Almallah, and Fakhreddine puts the comparison into the permanent public record in a way a quiet contract victory never could. If that was the goal, the filings look less like miscalculation and more like a trade she made.<\/p>\n
I would also watch the phrase itself. “Lost touch with reality” is the accusation her opponents make, and picking it up as an analytic category imports their frame. The more defensible claim, and the one your material supports, is narrower: she litigated the case she has been arguing in public rather than the case the record gave her, and that choice cost her the counts that were dismissed with prejudice. That is a claim about judgment under adversarial conditions. It can be shown from the documents. The other cannot, and would be the kind of sentence you would not want to defend on the front page.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Claude says Sep. 1, 2026: Amy Wax appears to have left her strongest Ahmad Almallah comparator out of her own federal complaint. In Wax v. Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, decided August 27, 2025, Judge Timothy J. Savage, Senior … Continue reading