[Psst! It’s Georgetown University Law Center, not “school.” The Hill and other lazy publications keep calling it the law school, which was what the institution’s name was before it moved from the Georgetown campus (in Georgetown, a picturesque section of D.C.) to Capitol Hill near all the courts, including the Supreme Court. If you saw the place, you would know that “center” is an appropriate description. The name was the inspiration of then Dean Paul Dean, visionary, a respected lawyer and talented fund-raiser. He was also a good friend of mine as well as a cherished mentor]
William Trainor has been criticized on Ethics Alarms before notably during this fiasco, when he punished an incoming faculty member, Illya Shapiro, for daring to question Joe Biden’s wisdom of narrowing his choice of Supreme Court nominees to fill a vacancy to women of color, the same criteria that worked out so, so well with Kamala Harris. Following the lead of his radically indoctrinated students (it’s supposed to be the other way around), the GULC dean suspended Shapiro pending…well, something, and then after letting him twist slowly in the wind for months, finally let him back into the fold whereupon Shapiro quite properly told him to take his job and shove it, as I would have under like circumstances.
There were other instances when Trainer allowed his institution to be more woke than responsible; he is largely the reason my Law Center diploma is turned face to the wall in my ProEthics office. Here is an episode that didn’t directly involve the Dean but that occurred on his watch.
Now comes another skirmish. Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin sent a letter to GULC last month asking if the Law Center had eliminated its commitment to DEI. “At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered,” Martin wrote.
Them’s fightin’ words to a committed social justice warrior like Treanor, so the dean responded that his school complies with all laws around discrimination and harassment (despite insisting that only a black woman should be considered for a position on the Supreme Court and punishing a scholar who opined otherwise), and that… “The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it,” Treanor said. He went on to claim that it is a “constitutional violation” for Martin to say he will not hire from certain schools unless they conform to the Trump administration’s assessment of what competent and trustworthy law school grads need to be taught. “We look forward to your confirming that any Georgetown-affiliated candidates for employment with your office will receive full and fair consideration,”Treanor concluded in the letter.
All of my many fellow graduates of Georgetown Law Center are hailing Treanor’s words as if were Nathan. This is—we have been getting a lot of this lately—“bias makes you stupid” exemplified. Martin’s letter was a valuable heads up, and there is nothing unconstitutional about it, as I suspect Treanor knows. Any employer has the right to decide,
“Based on what this school’s leadership says in official statements and does, this law school does not teach the essential values that a competent, responsible, ethical lawyer must have absorbed in his or her legal education, including a fealty for freedom of speech and equal protection. Therefore, unless you can assure us that your law school no longer teaches students to value group membership over merit and excellence, and does not inculcate its future lawyers with the belief that racial, gender and other discrimination in the form of DEI policies and programs are acceptable, but rather a rejection of the core values, not only of the law, but the nation, we have no choice but to regard your graduates as less promising candidates for employment here than those of other schools.”
Several federal judges have made it clear that they will not hire graduates of Columbia’s and Yale’s law schools because of their lockstep progressive curriculum and policies, and if those judges haven’t widened the blacklist to include Georgetown, they should. But if Treanor wants to play the game of “I’m shocked—shocked!—that anyone would find our curriculum anything but as pure as the driven snow!,” law students at his school now know that they are the ones who will be hurt along with the reputation that GULC has worked so hard to build.
Ethics Alarms 
IMO those empty, soul-less, scared $#!tless eyes suggest someone that’s going to snap…HARD…in the near future.
PWS
How does an unwillingness to hire a student from a particular school based on its curriculum an infringement on the school’s speech? I don’t expect that there are any grads from Podunk School of Law becoming clerks at the SCOTUS or even a federal prosecutor.
It would seem to me that demanding anyone in particular be considered for a job would be an infringement on the rights of the employer.
Of course. The GULC response is embarrassing.
Voltaire is said to have remarked that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor roman, nor an empire. Also, that Jack Marshall, Legal Ethicist, is neither legal nor an ethicist. I know that this entire blog is based on the bizarre notion that ethics are defined not by reference to any rational code but simply “Things I dislike,” but I thought this story was such a layup that even you couldn’t get it wrong. And yet, somehow, you managed the basketball equivalent of an own basket.
Ed Martin, a government employee, demonstrates (for the umpteenth time since he took office) that he does not understand his role or the oath of office he took, which was to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump. One would think that a (self-proclaimed) ethicist would pounce on that, explaining how unethical it is for a U.S. Attorney to act as if he were the president’s lawyer rather than a public servant. One would think that someone who graduated from law school would understand that a government official has no authority to declare that a private school’s curriculum is “unacceptable.” Shockingly — to mix sports metaphors — you somehow managed fumbled the ball on both those points, and to completely miss the point that whatever rights a private employer might have do not necessarily translate to a government employer.Dean Treanor’s letter is “embarrassing” only in that it treated Martin as if he were misguidedly sending the letter in good faith, rather than calling Martin out for what his letter is: pure legal thuggery. If you are incapable of seeing that, then I’m sure Georgetown is grateful that you have turned your diploma to face the wall.
I am quite confident that you will ban me from commenting here, and likely not publish this comment at all, because you only want sycophants in the comment section. But at least I can confirm that bias does make Jack Marshall stupid.
Gee, exactly four years almost to the day when I passed your first and only previous comment through moderation—a better one if still obnoxiously worded—this turns up. Heck, if your insulting responses are only going to arrive like Leap Year, I can tolerate that. Meanwhile…
1. I’ve never been compared to the Holy Roman Empire before. Cool!
2. Martin is following his oath and his job’s mission by alerting schools that DEI is illegal as well as a violating of Constitutional principles. It just hasn’t been definitively ruled as such, but the SCOTUS affirmative action ruling strongly suggests that it will be. Many schools, including law schools, have ended DEI programs after the mere threat of legal challenge.
3. Any law school adopting the policy of pushing political ideology on its students from the Left or the Right is a bad law school. GULC charges students large amounts of money to go there on the current belief that a degree and the likely contacts made in the course of four years will assist a career goal of government service.
4. Under Treanor, the Law Center has made it clear that it doesn’t support freedom of speech or academic freedom, among other destructive trends.If Treanor or his students are under the impression that there are no consequences of doing this, that misimpression needs to be corrected, and the sooner the better.
5. The government, its Justice Department, or any other federal agency have a right to decide what credentials qualify an individual for employment. It is not “bullying” to accurately and correctly inform a school such as GULC that its current manner of training lawyers makes its law degree a handicap rather than an enhancement.
6. Treanor’s letter is indeed an embarrassment because it calls employer discretion unconstitutional. Judges announced that they would no longer hire clerks from law schools that were hostile to free expression, and no one was silly enough to suggest that that they had not power to do that. But the dean of a top 20 law school actually made that absurd assertion, and in public. Wow. One more reason not to hire lawyers from GULC.
7. When I attended GULC, i detected no effort to impose ideology or thought conformity on me or my fellow students at all. Despite the school’s reputation for graduating activists, its main reputation was for graduating excellent litigators. I had left-leaning professors and right-leaning professors, and was hired by the new dean without any reference to my political views whatsoever. That’s how an ethical law school operates.
8. GULC no longer does. Attention should be paid. Martin was quite correct in pointing out what the school’s unethical obsession with DEI—as in compensatory discrimination–means for the employment prospects of its graduates.
9. A famous quote for lawyers is “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.” You just pounded the table.
Oh, to be clear, calling me stupid is forbidden as a debate tactic in the Commenter policies above. So any comment you try to slip by before March, 2029 will not stay up for long. But you knew that…any way, looking forward to seeing your comment in four years!
I get a kick out of the “I support the Constitution!” lefty talking point/wan assertion. Reminds me of my Trump Deranged former high school buddy (sat behind him in almost every class through four years given our last names’ placement in the alphabet) who was a Naval aviator. He once yelled at me, “I took an oath the uphold the Constitution!” as if that was dispositive of whatever complaint he was making about Trump. Clearly, everything Trump does or even considers is, ipso facto, unconstitutional.
Thanks, Jack. Now I will have to wait 4 years to find out where in the Constitution lies the power (or mandate) that the government take money from working taxpayers and gives it to “big name” law schools (or centers).
Silly me! By focusing only on the central fallacy of this guys complaint, I neglected to point out the larger issue that he doesn’t know what ethics is. The smoking gun: “on the bizarre notion that ethics are defined not by reference to any rational code.” As I explain elsewhere, many times, including in the definitions section, ethics as defined here (since ethicists disagree) does not primarily involve “codes,” but analysis according to the various ethics systems posited over the centuries as well as our evolving societal and cultural values. What old Every Four Years is talking about is morality, which is easy: you follow the rules. In ethics we understand that one can follow rules and still be unethical, and that one can violate the rules and be more ethical than if you followed them.
How I love being called a fake ethicist by people who don’t know what an ethicist is!
You think being from Georgetown is bad; Sunny Hostin is a Notre Dame Law School grad. Sigh.