United States of KetmanLaw firm sacks partner for agreeing with Dobbs decision, sending powerful message to dissenters
Rod Dreher
Nov 30, 2022
Earlier today I posted portions of a letter that Kansas State Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall sent to the University of Kansas law school, resigning from his teaching position in protest of how the school is violating the principles of the legal profession through militant woke policies. He noted in particular that some law students complained that the feared for their physical safety because a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom was going to be in the law school building giving a presentation. Justice Stegall, in his letter to the law school, said that shutting down dissent within the law school, and allowing law students to believe that they have a right to expect this, is both to fail to form people qualified to practice law, and to undermine a fundamental basis of liberal democracy. In response to the Stegall post, a Christian law professor of some note e-mailed me subsequently to say:
I am raising my kids within the faith. They are great kids. It pains me to realize that if I am successful, I am likely preparing them for a life of ostracism, obscurity, or ketman.
Yes. This is the reality that all faithful Christians face. More on this in a second. But first, he sent a link to this piece by law professor Jonathan Turley. Excerpts:
In a column in the Wall Street Journal, Robin Keller, a partner at Hogan Lovells, wrote about being fired from the firm after a distinguished career of 44 years. Keller was not fired for intermingling funds or violating confidentiality of clients. She was fired because she exercised free speech in an internal meeting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. After Keller expressed her support for the opinion and concern about higher rates of abortions in the black community, a participant complained that she could not breathe and others called her a racist. She was later suspended and reportedly fired.
More:
Lawyers at the firm demanded the firing of Keller and said that they were “traumatized” by having to hear someone defend the decision on a call to allow people to discuss the decision.
Let’s repeat that again . . . these are lawyers who were traumatized because a colleague expressed a dissenting view of abortion, a view held by millions of other Americans as well as many judges and justices. It is a view that has been expressed widely in the media, including by African-American and female commentators.
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Yet, rather than engage Keller on why they believe that she is wrong, these lawyers asked her to leave the call and then pushed for her to be fired for expressing her views. As we have seen on college campuses, it has become commonplace to seek to silence others rather than to engage them in such debates.
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Lawyer Robin Keller's column is not paywalled at the Wall Street Journal; you should read it. The situation was even worse than Prof. Turley writes. Excerpt:
Everyone else who spoke on the call was unanimous in her anger and outrage about Dobbs. I spoke up to offer a different view. I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies. I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide. I said I thought this was tragic.
The outrage was immediate. The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they “lost their ability to breathe” on hearing my comments. After more of the same, I hung up.
Someone made a formal complaint to the firm. Later that day, Hogan Lovells suspended my contracts, cut off my contact with clients, removed me from email and document systems, and emailed all U.S. personnel saying that a forum participant had made “anti-Black comments” and was suspended pending an investigation. The firm also released a statement to the legal website Above the Law bemoaning the devastating impact my views had on participants in the forum—most of whom were lawyers participating in a call convened expressly for the purpose of discussing a controversial legal and political topic. Someone leaked my name to the press.
They denounced her to the entire firm as a racist for having said that a disproportionate number of black babies die by abortion, and that this is a bad thing. This is Woke Kafka.
This is going to keep happening until and unless we fight back, and fight back hard. As far as I know, the only meaningful weapon conservatives and old-fashioned liberals have is politics -- this, given that the woke left has captured virtually ever major institution in American public life. What can politicians do, though? I ask as a sincere inquiry. What kind of pressure can they put on the law profession (to cite only one example) to compel it to turn from its soft totalitarianism? Are conservative strategists figuring this out? We'll all be in the gulag before the current Republican Party does anything about it.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/united-states-of-ketman/
