I keep banishing “Above the Law,” (ABL) the wildly unethical partisan and woke-biased legal gossip site, from my email and it keeps sneaking back in. This story, by Kathryn Rubino (who once concocted an alleged “scandal” about me), is so outrageous it is beneath the site’s previous bottom of the barrel lows. I didn’t think that was possible. Impressive.

A tax partner in a major law firm (his name isn’t necessary, since the issue is ABL’s abuse of him, not the lawyer himself) engaged in a dispute over the management of his apartment building and the behavior of fellow residents. ABL’s breathless headline, “Biglaw Partner Drops Slur In Dustup With Neighbors.” ‘Oh oh,’ I thought, as did many other readers. “He must have called someone a ‘nigger.’ That’s going to get him in trouble with the firm.”

That wasn’t the slur, however. He emailed a complaint that read, “The retarded tenants of 6W opened the fire alarm door to my terrace.”

The word, which I do not accept as a per se “slur,” meant “stupid” in the context of the message. The situation reminded me of the court decision which held that calling a male employee a “bitch” in the workplace was not harassment, but calling a female a bitch is. The objects of the lawyer’s admittedly uncivil message were not developmentally disabled, so ABL’s efforts to have him “cancelled” for political correctness is 1) desperate 2) mean-spirited 3) irresponsible 4) typical of woke bullies 4) a violation of the Golden Rule, and 5) retarded.

Regarding #4: Ethics Alarms has written about this before, in many settings at many times. Taking a badly considered use of words out of a private conversation, argument or email exchange and publicizing it to embarrass and harm the speaker or writer is indefensible. It is wrongful conduct when it is done to the President of the United States, it is wrongful when it is done to an NBA team owner, it is wrongful when it is done to a lawyer, and it is wrongful when it is done to your boyfriend who broke up with you in a text message. The ethics issue is simple: doing this to anyone is deliberately harming another human being because one can, using a single moment of bad manners, emotion or poor impulse control as an excuse.

The lawyer’s trivial squabble is considered newsworthy by Above the Law. I bet the lawyer is a Republican. That would explain why this disgusting site chose to embarrass him.

[Note: I am not including a link to the story, because I don’t want to send any clicks to this rotten site. You’ll just have to trust me on this one.]