Supreme Court A Hot Mess

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m joined by Kathryn Rubino.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey.

Joe Patrice:

And Chris Williams. And, hello? Hello. There you go. Alright. And we are doing, there was a delay there that I was just not prepared for. All right. So we are doing what we usually do, which is give a rundown of the big stories from the week that was in legal over here at Above the Law. First. We of course, do a little bit of, oh, that’s the sound that says we do small talk. Small talk. Okay. Yeah. So how’s everybody doing

Kathryn Rubino:

Living the dream over here? We are a potty training my 2-year-old. So yeah, this is a thing that’s going on.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I don’t really have much to, yeah, I don’t really have much to report on my end just because I haven’t been able to get out and do anything really. The last few days I was going to go into the city, Ellie Misal, our former host of this show now at the Nation, was appearing at an event for Mike Sachs, who some folks know as a legal reporter, but who’s now running for Congress. And Ellie was doing an event with him and I was meant to go to that, but then got waylaid by stuff and not able to make it down. So that was going to be my thing I could have chatted about, but

Kathryn Rubino:

Couldn’t do it. So you’re telling us now what could have been small talk

Joe Patrice:

But

Kathryn Rubino:

Isn’t actually small talk.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, that’s correct.

Kathryn Rubino:

Cool.

Chris Williams:

Well give the man kudos for inventing smaller talk as a segment, but going to the topic. So I had a pretty good weekend friend came down from dc. His girlfriend was in a singing competition. It was like national. She got second place. So she’s phenomenal. Shout out to her and ooh, took my mom to Puli and it was a great time. She was like, this is so fancy. I’ve only seen stuff like this on TV shows. I’m pretty much son of the weekend in that regard. I finished season three of Squid Game. Look

Kathryn Rubino:

At you. You had a banger weekend over here.

Chris Williams:

Writers Without Life outside of work are sad to read. So I try to do a little something every now and again. And also it’s just good for the heart. But yeah, no spoilers. I will say I do think it is worth a watch. Check it out if you’ve seen Squid Games one and Seasons one and two, and if you haven’t, what are you doing? Go watch Squid Game, get caught up on the pop cultures guys and what have you. But yeah, I had a really good weekend.

Joe Patrice:

Excellent. Well, all right then.

Chris Williams:

So

Kathryn Rubino:

Smaller talk is done.

Joe Patrice:

So we all as a country, had a really terrible weekend, and that’s because the Supreme Court finished out. Its, well that didn’t really finish out its term, but functionally finished out its merits term, let’s put it that way on Friday. And they did it with a series of horrific opinions were each more horrific than the last. But there were going into that last week were, I guess it wasn’t even just, we shouldn’t just limit it to Friday, there were things going on that whole week that were bad as they tried to run down things. Yeah,

Chris Williams:

I knew Friday was going to be bad because Thursday was horrible.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s fair.

Joe Patrice:

So one thing that came down though, not really on the merits side of things, but in the shadow docket side of things, this happened earlier in the week and we had a story about it that did reasonably well. I think we’ll talk generally about the court in a minute, but we’ll start with this one story as our anchor, which was we had the opinion in the DVDV versus DHS, which sounds like a media war from the late nineties or something.

Chris Williams:

Sure. However,

Joe Patrice:

You’re

Chris Williams:

About to talk about a tech battle or something.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, exactly. But what it actually is, is the case in Boston where they’re trying to send a bunch of people to South Sudan, the government is because it’s not where any of those immigrants are from, but no one else wants to take them, so they’re going to send them to a war zone in South Sudan. This is a issue,

Chris Williams:

First off, not the onion.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, no, not the onion. And this is an interesting case just because unlike what’s going on with some of those folks sent to El Salvador where we have no real reason to believe they’ve done anything, most of the people involved in this case are our criminal folks. But that said, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the right to point out that they shouldn’t go to the middle of a war zone if there’s no other alternative.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean, I think that it bears repeating and something I think gets lost a lot, but just because you’ve done a crime does not mean you have zero rights.

Joe Patrice:

And what happens in this case is, so there was an effort to move them to these other countries. Ultimately, a lot of them are now in Djibouti kind of awaiting resolution of this. What the judge ordered is that these people need to be given a hearing with interpreters and their own lawyers and so on, where as part of this process, you’re allowed to have a hearing about whether or not the place the US wants to send you is going to kill you. He says, this is probably one of those instances where that should be happening. Sure.

Chris Williams:

Can you seek asylum from a place you’re about to get deported to? Right.

Joe Patrice:

And look, this is, again, probably not people who are eligible for asylum, but they might be people that are eligible for being kept in US prisons or something like that, rather than sent over there. So the relatively minor relief that he ordered, which was actually the relief that the government asked for at first, and then once they got it, they complained about it, was that they just get to have these hearings in Djibouti without having to be brought back to the us. Pretty simple. Then what happened is this makes it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court on the shadow docket says, oh, the injunction, we’ve decided that goes away. We’re going to put a stay on it. We might bring it back later depending on how this case plays out. This therefore seemingly means the government can go ahead and act. But they do this, and this is what’s kind of interesting about it from a lawyerly sense.

A lot of people reported on the underlying story. But what was interesting is a lawyerly sense is that because it’s on the shadow docket and judges don’t like to, the Supreme Court justices don’t like to acknowledge what they’re doing on that docket. So the order is a paragraph of just matter of factly, this is what we’re doing. They don’t explain themselves at all. So Justice Sotomayor takes an opportunity to expound upon it a little bit in dissent, and rather than just say, I disagree with this, she writes a lengthy dissent in which she explains why she thinks this is a problem, but also inserts, I would say, some little time bombs. She puts in an explanation that there are different orders here, there’s an injunction, and then there’s remedial orders. And the remedial orders aren’t actually here. Wink, wink, wink, which is true. So the judge had put on a preliminary injunction saying they had to not do anything in the interim, but also had some remedial orders of like, well, right now what you need to do is have these hearings.

Those had not been, this is back to your civil procedure issue, spotter. Those had actually not been brought before the court. So after Sotomayor puts this in the dissent of if the majority’s not going to characterize what the opinion says, she’s going to do it for them. And so she puts this in there and moments later, judge Murphy in Boston’s like, oh, okay, well then we’re going to deny the stay of the remedial orders. I guess those weren’t really in front of the Supreme Court. So first off, this is the thing with the shadow docket. If we’re going to keep making law by not writing and defending it, I think it’s a new and fun use of the dissent function to characterize what the opinion is from dissent if the majority doesn’t want to do it.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think it bears repeating the increased use of the shadow docket and the lack of written explanation as to what the shadow docket means is really disturbing. Even at one point, Amy Cody Barrett said, I wish people would just read the decisions because they insert their own personality into it or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, but they’re actually in this instance complaining about a shadow docket which had nothing written. And the more and more the court uses the shadow docket to make law, I think it does really hurt its legitimacy in fundamental ways. It’s something Elena Kagan has spoken about quite frequently, and it really only gets worse. And I think you characterize it as sort of outlawing the majority. And I think that that’s really true. And when you’re kind of faced with these kind of problematic opinions, or not even opinions, but orders from the shadow docket, what remedy does a justice have except for bearing witness to what’s going on? And I think that, so do my, or really showed that there, there’s some fast moves that can be made.

Joe Patrice:

Well, and I don’t even know as though it’s bearing witness. I think it really is. You brought up that Barrett quote, which

Was fairly infamous, where she says, well then just read the opinion. We explain everything, and it’s almost like, so Mayor said, oh, really? That’s a good point. Opinions can do a lot. Opinions can explain a lot. And just decided, well, if no one else is going to talk, I am, which I thought was interesting, I think it could be. We stay tuned to see how this plays out in the future. A lot of right wing outlets immediately started saying that these judges are disobeying the Supreme Court. But this goes back to another aspect. We see this, it’s been true dating back clear back to the student loan cases that from the Biden administration, a lot of people who just don’t understand that rulings, while the Supreme Court may be partisan, it’s not an institution built to be partisan.

And so when they make a partisan ruling like we’ve decided you can’t give student debt relief, they didn’t really do that. They ruled on one particular avenue of it. And so Biden did another one, and that case never got to the Supreme Court. And this is same sort of thing, and this is something that I think really speaks to the way in which the court getting more partisan is a problem for the country writ large, is that people assume it’s trying to act like a Congress because it wants to act like a Congress, but the institution itself won’t let it. And here we have another instance of that where they want to say, go ahead and send these people to South Sudan. That’s

Kathryn Rubino:

The

Joe Patrice:

Point.

Kathryn Rubino:

But they actually have to rule on the case or controversy before them. And if there’s only one of the injunctions being appealed in front of them, then that’s all they can actually do.

Joe Patrice:

So we had some lawyer ball, which was very exciting to watch, for those of you who are excited about that sort of thing. All right, we’re back. So then down the stretch, what we had were a bunch of opinions. We had an opinion in the birthright citizenship case. This one ultimately was not about birthright citizenship, but was just the majority saying we can’t have district courts issuing injunctions that bind the whole country anymore.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, did they actually say it like that? I read it a little bit even more broadly than that, which is that judges can’t, and so I’m not confident that an injunction that was issued by a circuit court panel wouldn’t be overturned.

Joe Patrice:

Well, they would never do that. Right.

Kathryn Rubino:

Or upheld by a circuit court. But there’s also a lot of the sort of potential remedies to the problem of a judge in Amarillo getting to issue a nationwide and judge that people have talked about that I think might still potentially run afoul of the decision.

Joe Patrice:

Right. Well, I mean, that was the part of this that gets annoying a lot of, there’s kind of this trend in particular in political argument from one side of the world where they look to see somebody saying the same thing on the other way, kind of a both side thing and going like, yep, I agree. And so a lot of people started pointing to the complaints that were raised when one judge in Amarillo, which we keep bringing up that example, starts taking AstroTurf fake part litigants and using those cases to issue nationwide injunctions that bound the Biden administration up to and up to having the State Department show up and explain foreign policy to him all the time. Things that are really egregious. The Supreme Court did nothing about that when that was going on other than to the judicial conferences. Abortive attempt to say that you can’t choose your judge specifically if you are seeking a nationwide injunction. That was a rule proposed that the Fifth Circuit immediately said no,

Kathryn Rubino:

Nah.

Joe Patrice:

So that kind of didn’t work, but that was the only reform that had been proposed up until now. There are reforms out there. So basically what, back to my point about people point to it, there were a lot of complaints about that from the left during when it was happening to the Biden administration. Now, there’s a lot of folks saying that this opinion is kind of a destruction of the rule of law is in real danger, which is also probably true. People are trying to say, see, they said the opposite earlier, which is not the case really because there’s a big difference between an individual judge being selected doing that and what was going on here, because I think a lot of folks, oh yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

No, I think you’re right. And I think a helpful way to kind of create the distinction is that previously the remedy in and of itself was never questioned as illegitimate. It was questioned as to whether or not you can file a lawsuit in a particular court such that you get a single judge who’s necessarily going to rule on whether or not that remedy is applicable in that case. And so it was never the remedy that was questioned, but rather the way that you get to pick your judge

Joe Patrice:

And the damage of it was that it allowed the sort of games playing.

In this instance, in this particular case, it’s not the opposite of games playing the district judge in question is a Reagan appointee. I mean, no one was trying to gain this system. This is just how it goes. What I will say about the reform situation is though, is that in the past, there were reforms that said, Hey, maybe you don’t get to choose your judge if it’s a nationwide injunction or maybe, and this is one that I’ve seen proposed in a lot of places that I think makes a lot of sense. If you are seeking that kind of injunction, it has to be referred to a three judge panel randomly picked from across the country. That way if something’s going to bind to the whole country, it has to be taken to another level.

Kathryn Rubino:

All the judges in the country kind of have to be on the wheel. It could potentially be in front of them.

Joe Patrice:

I’ve also heard that it be just referred to the DC district too, which is another potential answer, but the point is there’s lots of different reforms that could be done to this power. What this opinion did instead was say, let’s not even allow this power to exist anymore. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, I think that this is really dangerous, first of all, because there are absolutely instances you need this power. And I think the dissents do a really good job of pointing out some of the more dire instances where that is true. But to put a pin in that discussion, which I’m sure we’ll have in a second, it also is really kind of foreshadowing in an unsettling way because as you just talked about that when we had a democratic president, the right wing used this mechanism all the time, and they were the biggest fans of it, and now it’s not even on the table, which in the foreshadowing sense makes you wonder, is there going to be another election? Is there going to be a third term for Trump? I think that if we go down a more dystopian path as a nation, this will be one of those moments that will really get a highlighter on it.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Now Justice Barrett’s decision does have a few carve outs in it. Oh yeah. You could have a class action. I mean, meanwhile, the courts have been largely

Kathryn Rubino:

Destroying those as well,

Joe Patrice:

Destroying your ability to create viable class actions, but whatever. And there’s also, justice Jackson writes a really strong dissent here. Justice Barrett, like a good law professor, addresses that head on with a, in which she goes, we’re not going to deal with her arguments other than to say we disagree, which I wish I could write, could have written that in on my one L

Kathryn Rubino:

Exam. It was super disrespectful. I thought too, the way it was written,

Joe Patrice:

It was disrespectful. Yes. It was also just giving up the game that these people have no argument. You can’t be bothered to respond to the dissent. That’s fine if you want to just pretend it didn’t happen. But at the point that they flagged it, it was just so embarrassing. It just looked like these people, these people saw it, recognized it was a problem, and decided

Kathryn Rubino:

What if I didn’t?

Joe Patrice:

So that happened. We had the implications of this of course, is now constitutional rights basically won’t exist unless you bring suit in any real functional way. If somebody tries to go after birthright citizenship or some other thing that affects you as a member of that class, really you are probably not going to be able to protect yourself from those abuses unless the individual goes to court yourself, with the exception of there are these carve outs for class actions, probably not really a reasonable reliable response. There’s some arguments to be made about attorneys general being able to bring broad claims, which I think that is pretty powerful, but that then still will limit it to states that have blue ag.

Kathryn Rubino:

The other thing that I was going to say is this is particularly chilling when you couple it with a movement to force plaintiffs to put up large bonds when they’re suing the government. That is a movement that’s happening, and it’s not sure if it is part of the bill. It’s part of the current proposed bill. And if that happens, you’re very much saying, if you are not even just poor, if you are middle class, you have no realistic way to enforce your rights in

Joe Patrice:

Court.

Kathryn Rubino:

There is the government can do whatever wants to your rights because there’s no structure that can stop it.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, yeah. Well, we had that had Justice Alito declaring open season on public schools, basically ruling that in a case that ostensibly is about an opt-out saying that parents should be able to remove their kids from any lesson that involves gay people existing. That of course seemingly you say, oh, it’s just an opt-out. But these opt-outs become entirely unworkable and more to the point and where it gets to be the second level from most conversation about it is as opposed to trying to square peg round hole, the idea that there’s some sort of a rational government interest in allowing this alito went a step further to advance the ball to saying that religious objections should have a strict scrutiny. This is rich considering this is the same court that said that you can force kids to pray with their coach, but nonetheless saying that this is strict scrutiny and that there has to be some sort of compelling government interest in not allowing opt-outs, which the reason this takes it to a new level of course, is that now there’s not really any limit on what people can say. I’ve decided this offends me religiously. So schools can’t teach it or more accurately. So schools have to give me an optout, which schools have a hard time administering, and therefore to avoid that they’ll just stop teaching.

Kathryn Rubino:

And when you think about it in terms of things like evolution, which people have religious objections to, they opt out of their lessons on evolution. But what if it’s still on the year end statewide regents exam, all of a sudden, well, can they put that? Then on the Regents exam, you see how it really is not just about the ability to opt out of specific lessons or this book that you may not want your kids to read in school, but really fundamentally is an attack on public education.

Joe Patrice:

There’s also, and this is a point that I make in a piece on it, this also comes to, there’s, I read a book, Jason Kirk’s book, which is fiction, but about his experiences kind of growing up in the evangelical movement. There are a lot of evangelical churches that have fully taken independent political beliefs and bolted religiosity on them. I mean, there are churches in this country who think that talking about climate change is an attack on their religion. They’re just bolting all of this into that. And when you have a society that’s stretching the bounds of what religious faith is to include contemporary partisan politics, you now have given that a extra barrier of protection within the system. So now you really can’t teach any of this stuff once people start to complain

Chris Williams:

For what it’s worth as a religious tenant, I don’t believe in Keynesian economics. So maybe something there

Joe Patrice:

And a lot of them, but yeah, no, it gets real out of hand real fast when you start employing this. Now, again, I would love somebody to take this strict scrutiny thing and re-litigate the make forced school prayer because I’m real interested to see how it goes now that it has a higher stricter scrutiny.

Kathryn Rubino:

I’m sure this court would find

Joe Patrice:

A way to, my guess they just find a way to shrug.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, the underlying facts of that case were so distorted by the time it got to the court in order for the court to issue the decision it wanted to, I have no doubt it would continue. Along that path,

Joe Patrice:

Justice Thomas wrote a separate opinion, which he basically said that public schools should really only be teaching the stuff that the founders would’ve known. Computers

Kathryn Rubino:

Never heard of them.

Joe Patrice:

The descent, the dissent questioned what would happen to learning about computers or anything like that under Thomas’s model, which I did love that they took time to attack Thomas, who was not, how dumb is it, who was not the majority opinion, but they just wanted to point out that this was also really stupid. So, so that’s where we are right now. There’s a few more non-decision based stuff they got to clean up, but otherwise they’re done for the term. Alright, so a big story that made mainstream news, but we kind of covered it from a slightly different angle. More legally, the made mainstream news is that the University of Florida Law School gave a prize the prize for the best paper in the class to a person who’s told the times that it would not be inaccurate to call them a Nazi. And the paper itself was an argument that the constitution should only apply to white people,

Chris Williams:

Which following originalism duh. And part of my take on it was being just trying to be aware of what was happening about the reception of this paper and what interruptions I could make into how people were talking about this proper. So I think pretty sure it was covered by the New York Times and the way that the New York Times framed it, it was like this white supremacist Nazi student wrote this wild alt-right paper. And all of that may also be true, but my thing that I thought was important to draw focus on is this is also contemporary conservative politics. What he’s saying, you’ll find politicians elsewhere saying similar things or the outcome other their policies would be this.

Joe Patrice:

Right.

Chris Williams:

There was a point in the paper he was saying, for non-whites we should disenfranchise ’em quite literally remove the right to vote and give them about 10 years to leave. No politicians explicitly saying that, but there are a lot of Republicans that are advocating for gerrymandering that has the effect of not letting black people’s vote. There was a point where he was saying, oh, there should be shoot to order kills against illegal immigrants, which sounds crazy maybe, but in Texas they erected murder buoys to slice through people swimming onto American land and water and soil. So nothing though that he said was one very outfield of the contemporary over to window and two, nothing he said was that original. There was one person on blue sky that was like, what he’s basically doing is quoting clan constitutionalism,

Joe Patrice:

Which was a legal theory in the past,

Kathryn Rubino:

But in terms of it being rewarded in a law school setting, I think it’s super important to also be like, Hey, there are amendments that happened. Sure. Yes. And ignoring that and being rewarded as a piece of legal academia, I think is what people are. And certainly you would think the dean would be pretty upset about.

Chris Williams:

So one, the political things he’s advocating for are well within the norms of what you can see on Fox tv. Give it a couple steps. Two, there is proof of the scholarship he’s advocating for being held elsewhere. So yes, I was talking about this in terms of the thing that the student did, but he is also inroad to criticizing why the judge thought the judge who’s appointed by Trump, who was in the position of grading him, thought that this was an a worthy paper.

Joe Patrice:

Right. That’s the thing we have not yet said on this show that we need to clarify, which you’ve led in Which I Was on the road. The other aspect of this that’s pretty important is that the professor in question who gave this an A is an adjunct who is a Trump appointed judge.

Chris Williams:

Yes. Did say that. So there’s a thing where, I’ll give an example. I was graded on it. I went to law school, I had a paper, I’ll hand it in. I wrote a paper on this guy. I wrote an essay talking about the race-based jury nullification came out the nineties, I think his name was Paul Butler. Pretty big deal at the time for people that read law review articles.

I gave the essay and gave it to my law professor. He said, Hey, this was interesting. But it was largely a summary. You didn’t really produce a novel idea. I then went to office hours. I talked about him, talked about the paper. I said that the right to Jordan notification ought to be protected by the 10th Amendment. Paul makes inroads, but he doesn’t go this far. I presented a novel idea. The professor was like, you know what? That’s a good point. He ended up giving me full points. This paper had nothing new in it. It was just a rehashing of things that could be found elsewhere. So beyond the fanfare line, grabbing things of it, the focus should be on this teacher. What was his rubric? And the immediate response that he gave was that there would be no comment. Cool, whatever. Well, not cool. And so many people got focused on the fact that, oh, this student got an A, he cate the class. Does that suck? Yes. But the reason it sucks is because as a person that has taught at the college level, as a student that has written law school papers, my first question is when I get a grade is, let me see the rubric. Why did I get the grade that I did? What was the rationale for why this was graded in the way that it was?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, I think that’s also part of the issue with legal academia generally, is that they like big names to teach as an adjunct. And those aren’t necessarily people who are thinking about things like rubrics because he’s a judge. This is a side gig, this is not his focus. And I think a lot of law schools across the board are just getting big names to come in and teach without having that educational background.

Joe Patrice:

Well, and to Chris’s point about,

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s part of the problem,

Joe Patrice:

And to Chris’s point about the importance of that office hours conversation, that’s where a lot of the good stuff happens is refining it after a conversation like that, what are the odds that you’ve got a judge taking a bunch of time out to meet with everybody in office hours? It’s a thing. The dean wrote a response to this that we didn’t think was particularly compelling because it, yeah. So the problem with the dean’s response, and I kind of understand the dean’s responding to what I think is very much the straw argument, but I will admit is kind of an argument that the New York Times seems to play into, which is that something should be done about this paper and says, no, we aren’t going to second guess grades. And I think that’s right,

Kathryn Rubino:

Sloping and all that kind of

Chris Williams:

Stuff. And to be clear, I never advocate for regrading. Joe never advocates for regrading because we see that that’s not the

Joe Patrice:

Issue. The point that both Chris’s original article and then the one about the dean’s response really focus on is that’s not really what the conversation should be about. The conversation should be about what are you doing about a professor who seems to think this paper works? Who seems to think that you can have somebody turn something in at the end without having any conversations with them and knowing what’s going on and rewarding that. What about the one aspect of the Dean’s response is that the professor, well, he gave this grade, he took the paper at face value, and I was like, face value. Unless this paper is a satirical paper, then it’s not very compelling. I mean, it makes the argument that the words, the people at the beginning were about white folks. So everything that happened afterwards, including all the amendments, therefore are subservient to that. That’s what the hell is that

Kathryn Rubino:

Gibberish? Yeah.

Joe Patrice:

And the fact that you have somebody on staff who says, well, I took it at face value of academic or whatever, you didn’t think it was satirical. So at that point then it was really dumb.

Chris Williams:

And one thing about that framing is it implies that at face value, it still wasn’t a bad paper. Like we said earlier, that there are things that happened after the we that people think that would modify more other things that happened in the Constitution. But also there was, I think it was name Anthony and Michael cre, the lawyer who was on Blue Sky. He was like, there are other substantive issues throughout the paper.

So I feel like people that say things like, and this is to the guy who was writing for, I want to say V, they’re like, oh, well the citation is really well that is a sidestep, it’s a rhetorical sidestep. It’s important to draw that out. And again, this is not as much about the fact that he got an A, but the fact that a person who is supposed to be a judge, their job is reading and analyzing text in front of him that a judge could, one A, not point out, see the errors, and two is still a judge. Is that the guy that you want with

Kathryn Rubino:

A lifetime appointment?

Chris Williams:

Yes, A judge with a lifetime appointment who is going to see people who are either a non-white or immigrants in front of him. We know that he gave this paper an A. There’s no rubric to be like, Hey, here’s why I gave this rationale. It’s just no comment. The fact of this speaks to things much larger than a student getting an A and it being people discussing it as like, oh, well one, the paper was outlandish, one. No it wasn’t. And two, oh my God, he got an A misses the point.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah,

Chris Williams:

This guy, this student wanted to be going on to be a prosecutor.

Joe Patrice:

Well, obviously,

Chris Williams:

Yeah. So there’s so much more than what’s happening. And to be frank, the Dean’s response speaks to none of this. There are things at play that are much bigger than this, and I feel like me and you got at that people just didn’t respond to, and that worries me.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. And I am somewhat sympathetic to, as I said, to the idea that the dean was responding to the straw argument that maybe the Times coverage had let flourish, that it should be, oh, well, it’s all about changing this grade. Which yeah, both of us are like, that’s not

Chris Williams:

The issue. Yeah, the times was dumb. That was a dumb article.

Joe Patrice:

Well, I won’t say that. I will say I might not have explored all the issues that needed to be explored. How about that? Alright, so with that said, thanks for everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show, get the episodes when they come out, leave reviews, all that sort of thing. You should listen to the Jabo Catherine’s other show. I’m a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Round table. You should listen to the other shows on the Legal Talk Network. You should read Above the Law. So read these and other stories before they come out. You can also follow on social media Above the Law dot com on Blue Sky. I’m at Joe Patrice, she’s at Kathryn one. Chris is at Rights for Rent, and we will talk to you next week.

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