White Men at Work
The DOJ will now leave politics out of the hiring process for SLIP and the Honors program. What really strikes me are the comments on this VC thread for example. Basically, if I have the conservative mindset right, using politics to hire someone is ok, but using race or gender is not.
Labels: Legal Culture
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 4:09 PM
15 Comments:
"using politics to hire someone is ok, but using race or gender is not"
Isn't this more or less everyone's mindset, not just conservatives?
Do liberals think it would be wrong for the ACLU not to hire me because I think the Patriot Act is a good thing?*
Can the NRA refuse to hire me if I think assault rifles should be illegal, even if I think handguns should be legal?*
Do liberals think John Edwards should have to hire me to work for his campaign if I'm going to vote for McCain?*
Can the NAACP refuse to hire me if, even though I support every other NAACP cause, I am strongly opposed to affirmative action?*
Could a person who doesn't think greenhouses gases should be regulated complain if a Democratic wouldn't hire him to work at the EPA?*
Can a Supreme Court nominee complain if he doesn't get confirmed because he thinks abortion is or is not constitutionally-protected?
My point is that politics often go into hiring, so singling out conservatives is unfair. The more relevant question is whether the DOJ is a place that (like the NAACP, ACLU, and NRA) should be allowed to hire based on political views. My personal view is that everything involved in government is political, so don't work in government if you don't want your political views to matter. Next time a politician from either party starts appointing people from the opposite party to head "nonpolitical" government entities (like, presumably, the DOJ should be), let me know.
*These are merely illustrative and are not my personal views.
fyi, telebears seems to have dropped waitlist classes - folks might want to check it.
Darn, a little too late for those who applied to SLIP this year. But this bodes well for the 1L class and 2Ls wanting to apply to the honors program.
Though DOJ could just have their newly hired Fed Soc career attorneys do the hiring, thus leading to the same result.
Armen, there's a huge difference between political appointees and career employees in the government. You say that your personal view is that everything involved in government is political -- but should that be so? Career level employees at any agency should be hired based on merit and their ability to do the job. Would you like FDA employees to be hired based on politics?
From my limited inquiry around Boalt (i.e., one person), they had no problem getting a spot in SLIP despite liberal politics.
The second half of the Post article struck me as hokey, with the exception of the "cash prize" paragraph. What is that? Standard practice? I wish the article had followed up on that incident, as opposed to the other two seeimingly harmless anecdotes.
All in all, this doesn't seem like the scandal it looked like originally... it might just be some whiners at Harvard...
Good looking out about the tele-bears thing. ALL of the classes I was waitlisted on (which represented almost all of the classes I had) were dropped. :(
There's a couple of points being confused.
First, no one suggests political appointees shouldn't be hired on the basis of...politics. The question is, how should career DOJ employees (or aspirants in the SLIP or AGHP) be hired? It corrupts the function & purpose of the DOJ for politics to enter into low-level hiring decisions. Non-political positions should be open to everyone regardless of politics, race, or sex. In this administration, that doesn't appear to be the case.
Second, however, the DOJ should be hiring those people who will--and want to-- bring cases in the various divisions--civil, civil rights, environmental, criminal antitrust, etc.
Congress, in establishing the contours of the DOJ, has made it very clear that they expect the DOJ to function as plaintiffs and prosecutors on behalf of the public or marginalized groups of the public, depending on the case. Congress expects an adversarial contest against powerful interests on the other side: city governments, state governments, private interest, etc.
What's troubling is that many of the hires seem to be hired precisely to frustrate this goal. The "cash award" for NOT bringing an obvious (at least according to one court) civil rights claim is a prime example.
Granted, there must be some discretion in bringing cases--and that's why we have political appointees. But when a neutral judge thinks there's been a civil rights claim, you'd at least expect the DOJ civil rights division, which is supposed to represent and bring cases on behalf of civil rights plaintiffs, to participate.
(This needn't even be a liberal-conservative split. I applaud enforcement of violations of "religious liberties," which often pit poor churches and synagogues against powerful municipalities -- that's why the bipartisan RFRA got passed (and struck down) about 15 years ago. The DOJ should look for talented lawyers ready to vigorously prosecute those cases too.)
But DOJ hires seem to be increasingly frustrating this purpose -- at least when it comes to certain "liberal" functions of the DOJ. The department seems to act more like defense counsel than plaintiff's counsel.
If that's their goal, those hires shouldn't be in the DOJ. They should go work in Congress to change the DOJ's mission if they don't like it. They should go defend Exxon if they don't like environmental prosecutions. They should go defend the City of Birmingham or the State of Georgia if they don't like civil rights cases.
We wouldn't ask Chevron to hire a stringent environmentalist to mount a Clean Air Act defense, would we? We wouldn't ask UPS to turn its defense in a discrimination case over to the NAACP. So why is the DOJ hiring industry shills and people hostile to the concept of civil rights prosecutions to do environmental and civil rights prosecutions?
Is there tension between hiring not on the basis of politics and hiring effective prosecutors and litigations? There doesn't have to be. There's plenty of divisions in the DOJ that enforce all sorts of laws that have right, left, or no bent at all. So open the door to everyone--as long as they'd make good lawyers in their area. And if their (conservative) politics keep them from being effective in one division, put them in obscenity prosecutions or violent crime or RICO or "religious liberties' or any other area they believe in more strongly. And if they have "liberal" convictions well, obviously, there should be a place for them too. But, in this administration, there's not. That's the problem, that's the breach of ethics, that's the break with tradition -- and its why Congress should step in and clean house immediately.
Tom, just because one Boaltie you know applied for and obtained a SLIP position doesn't mean that many others didn't apply. I know for a fact that a lot more than the one Boaltie applied for, and did not get a SLIP position.
Also, recall that this wasn't instigated by some "whiners at Harvard." DOJ employees themselves wrote a letter (albeit an anonymous one, but given the recent firings and politicization of the agency under Bush it's quite understandable why they're afraid to reveal their identities) complaining of the politicization of the hiring process.
And really, the hiring of the Regent grad, who couldn't get a job anywhere else, is pretty pathetic. DOJ can attract the best and brightest, not unemployable grads from barely accredited law schools.
[spoken in baby-talk]
Aaaaawwwwww, did ittle-wittle Early Warren not get the jobby wobby he wanted???
can we erase 10:04 for being totally inappropriate and beside the point of a really interesting conversation?
While I don't support 11:07's attempt to censor 10:04's speech, I do agree that the comment was a very immature and irrelevant response to Earl Warren's thoughtful post.
I thought it was mildly funny.
10:04 here...
possibly immature, but not irrelevant (as far as N&B standards go)
I wanted to draw attiontion to the fact that EW seemed mighty worked up and pulled out some big and long arguments for a pretty small point...perhaps suggesting that the real reason EW was worked up was not injustice but its personal impact on him. But although that comment is certainly relevant, it is probably also boring. So I add a little humor...
Kudos (respect) to EW for taking it in stride.
attiontion?
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