Our judicial system, as imperfect as it may be (because nothing made by man is perfect), is still the best legal system in the history of mankind.
Our foundational principles, the right to counsel, innocent until proven guilty, trial by jury of your peers, thr burden of proof on the prosecutor, etc., all serve to prioritize the rights of the accused.
Our judicial system was supposed to be a bulwark against tyranny.
Out Founding Fathers wanted the judicial system to protect, and give the benefit of the doubt, to the accused citizen over the state prosecutor. They did not want the judicial system to be a tool of tyranny by using trials as a political weapon.
For the tyrant a perverted judicial system is a tool of oppression, where the guilt of the accused is determined by the political alignment or identity of the accused, and the judicial system prescribes innocence or guilt based on extraneous factors.
Our judicial system is based on the principle of equal application of the law. That may not have always been carried out but it was the principle, and one we strive to achieve.
For the tyrant, the law should be applied capriciously, to benefit those in favor and crush those disliked by the regime.
Woke is tyranny. It is a system that uses the power of both the government and popular opinion to crush those who refuse to submit to its ideology.
This is what is happening to our judicial system by the indoctrination and licensure of Woke lawyers.
It’s not just Yale Law School. It’s all the law schools.
And it’s not just in law schools. It’s in law firms, courts, and government agencies.
At @bariweiss‘s Substack, I explore the terrifying takeover of the American legal system. https://t.co/WVvmMhDR3o
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality” and assessing its “differential effects on subordinated groups.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the start of law school and “at least once again before graduation.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
That’s in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to “eliminate racism.” (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
It’s not just the elite law schools like Yale. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse was “further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Woke law schools and the Woke American Bar Association is not interested in neutral and equal application of the law. They want equity, where the law is a tool to achieve some ideal of cosmic justice. The individual accused and the merits of the case are irrelevant if the outcome of the case does not achieve their cosmic goals.
Hence the focus on the Rittenhouse trial. There was an organization of exculpatory evidence for Rittenhouse but they wanted him to be convinced to serve as a lesson, you do not stand up to a violent Woke mob.
At Boston College Law School this semester, a constitutional law professor asked students: “Who does not think we should scrap the constitution?” According to a student in the class, not a single person raised their hand.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Of course, because the Constitution protects the rights of the accused as universal for all accused. They want the rights of the accused to be determined by their Woke social hierarchy.
What happens at Yale Law School doesn’t stay at Yale Law School. Case in point: Rebecca Slaughter, a graduate of YLS and one of five commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission. In a Twitter thread in September 2020, Slaughter declared: “Antitrust can and should be antiracist.” pic.twitter.com/7dm8vikOqy
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Then she added: “There’s precedent for using antitrust to combat racism. E.g., South Africa considers #racialequity in #antitrust analysis to reduce high economic concentration & balance racially skewed business ownership.” pic.twitter.com/WDZO3ay4y3
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
South Africa has become a failed state where racial mass murder happens on a daily basis. That is a feature, not bug, for this system.
The idea that lawyers can’t be neutral, that confronting injustice must supersede all else, has eroded the norm that legal representation—like the ability to obtain medical care or buy a train ticket—is something every American deserves.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
As the new ideology has been institutionalized, the costs of disobeying it have grown steeper, both for faculty and for students. A Harvard Law professor told me that students face “social death” if they buck the consensus.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Law firms have been known to avoid unpopular clients, but the scope and frequency of these evasions have increased, dozens of lawyers interviewed for this story agreed. That’s partly because young lawyers see representing someone as tantamount to endorsing them.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
This is an ultimate betrayal of our judicial system, to deny the accused the right to counsel.
All “right minded” lawyers will deny the politically or socially undesirable representation and those lawyers who do their duty and protect the rights of the accused will become pariah in their field.
“It doesn’t even occur to people to take controversial cases,” one lawyer in Washington, D.C., said. Religious liberty cases, for example, are “totally off the table. I wouldn’t even think to bring it up.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
“If you were going to do a gun rights case, you would incur the wrath of other clients.” Since 2011, law firms have been pressured to drop or turn down a long list of clients: fossil fuel companies, foreign universities, employers challenging Biden’s vaccine mandate, Trump.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
“If you were going to do a gun rights case, you would incur the wrath of other clients.” Since 2011, law firms have been pressured to drop or turn down a long list of clients: fossil fuel companies, foreign universities, employers challenging Biden’s vaccine mandate, Trump.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
The problem, Strossen said, is that rights mean nothing without representation. “ANYONE who doesn’t have access to counsel in defending a right, as a practical matter, doesn’t have a meaningful opportunity to exercise that right,” the former ACLU chief told me in an email.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
This is a feature, not a bug. The government will strip you of a civil liberty and then you will be unable to fight in court to get it back because you will be unable to obtain a lawyer because the right you desire is disliked by the Woke mob.
Another cornerstone of the rule of law is an impartial judiciary. Some judges, however, have begun to see themselves not as impartial adjudicators, but as agents of social change—believing, like Slaughter, that they cannot be neutral in the midst of moral emergencies.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
During the BLM protests in 2020, Massachusetts Superior Court judge Shannon Frison vowed on Facebook to “never be silent or complicit again, in any courtroom or any context.” “As the very keepers of justice,” judges “not only stand with the protesters—we fall with them.”
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
The Washington State Supreme Court put out a statement recognizing “the role we have played in devaluing black lives,” and encouraged judges to strike down “even the most venerable precedent” if it is “incorrect and harmful.” https://t.co/bY8RrPXxUc
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Such statements are not mere virtue signaling. They reflect sincerely held beliefs with real-world consequences.
Case in point: the case of Montez Terriel Lee, Jr, who burned down a Minneapolis pawn shop in 2020, killing a 30-year-old father of five.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Usually, this sort of crime, according to federal sentencing guidelines, would have landed Lee in prison for up to 20 years. But the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, only asked for 12 years. https://t.co/hzmVfXxIW4
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
This is exactly what Biden’s current SCOTUS nominee has done regarding pedophiles.
Then there’s the erosion of the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. “The Anti-Innocence Project,” one criminal-defense attorney in San Francisco joked.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
“The same people who are anti-incarceration for some defendants will support life plus cancer for others,” said Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield), a criminal-defense attorney in New York.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 21, 2022
Again, the goal is capricious conviction based on the identity or political alignment of the accused, not the evidence of guilt.
They hate our judicial system and want to use it as a weapon of tyranny to reinforce their ideology.
They cannot overtly destroy it, they do not have the electoral mandate for that.
What they will do is fill the ranks if our judicial system, lawyers and judges, with Woke activists who put the tenets of their ideology above the principles of our system.
They have started to and very may well completely destroy justice in the country.
They are taking away the ballots box and taking away the jury box bulwarks against their tyranny.
They’re already reaping the whirlwind in woke cities w. doubling+ of violent crimes. The graduates of the ‘elite’ schools will all go to the cities and continue the process while smaller institutions will basically ignore the requirements and supply the rest of the country.
This is their ROI. https://www.foxnews.com/us/st-louis-prosecutors-decline-charges-suspect-carjacking-police-car
Soap box, ballot box, jury box gone…..
What box is left?
Pine
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-takeover-of-americas-legal-system?s=r
I have said before that this is a pendulum. The harder that it is swung to the left, the more severe will be the counter swing to the right. People will only endure so much before pushing the pendulum back the other way. They are losing the soccer moms, who are now angered that they are being silenced at school board meetings before being called terrorists.
Relevant to this vein of discussion: David Lat’s “Open Letter to Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken”
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/03/21/david-lats-open-letter-to-yale-law-dean-heather-gerken/printer/
You are about sixteen (remember Hildacunt/clintoon/obozobigMikesbitch?) years behind on losing the JustUs system and three+ years behind on the ballot box (not counting Chicongo). Try to keep up.
These are the Future Prosecutors and Future Judges.
That’s why the communists infiltrated the universities.