PRO-PALESTINE NYU LAW STUDENT SPEAKS OUT AFTER JOB OFFER WAS RESCINDED
PRO-PALESTINE NYU LAW STUDENT SPEAKS OUT AFTER JOB OFFER WAS RESCINDED
With tensions exploding on campuses across the country over Israel's war against Gaza, NYU Law student Ryna Workman lost their job offer.
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Well no shit. This person used their position in academia to spam out a newsletter of their political affiliation to the student body. The offer was rescinded because the law firm saw that they don’t know or follow proper etiquette in positions of supposedly unbiased positions. This person will likely not be proper legal counsel to individuals or companies they might not personally see eye to eye.
Yeah this is exactly right; an inability to separate their own political stance from their professional role. For the law firm, there is also a lack of insight and common sense around wading into such a controversial and difficult issue in such a way.
This is the text from their newsletter:
Hi y'all.
This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance. Instead…
I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison. I condemn the violence of collective punishment. I condemn the violence of phosphorous bombs. I condemn the violence of the United States military-industrial complex. >I condemn the violence of obfuscating genocide as a "complex issue.” I condemn the violence in labeling oppressed people as "animals." I condemn the violence in removing historical context. I condemn the violence of silence.
Palestine will be free.
Your SBA President,
RynaThis was in the NYU LAW Student Bar Association's SBA Weekly newsletter.
Even as someone who is generally pro-Palestine, if I was working at a law firm I would rescind a job offer to the person who wrote and sent around that letter.
I mean if I was hiring a roofer or something and saw that he had a pro Palestine newsletter like that, who cares. But if I'm hiring another professional whose entire job it is to not only see nuances in cases and arguments, but to recognize how best to present and argue them before a court of people who may have very different beliefs than them, and make frequent on the record statements that will be preserved until society collapses, then this gives me pretty ample reason to believe they won't be capable of executing any of that with the level of professionalism I would want out of a coworker.
Yup. I had a funny little blog while I was in college. I think i had twenty regular readers. It was unassociated with my name, but if you tried you could find the connections. When I went into tax and consulting, that blog disappeared into the aether. Publicly I had to be boring and professional. It's so... What's the word. Not me.
that blog disappeared into the aether
Out of curiosity... before, or after Archive.org?
No one backed it up in there. I checked. It was a small blog.
Then you will literally never hire an attorney.
A good attorney will be able to craft a powerful argument against their own core beliefs. This guy is very clearly incapable of that. A true professional can conduct an unbiased analysis, and then determine if it's an issue where you need to speak out or recuse yourself because of your biases.
Hollywood horseshit. If you are crafting an argument against your core beliefs you should not have taken that case, full stop. I'm not about to go argue against the Civil Rights Act because someone picked my name off of a random website. This is not something that happens in real life in any case that actually matters. If your client ends up with an unsatisfactory result your biases (that you did not adequately disclose, that you were not prepared to ignore) against your own client's interests open things up for a mistrial and possibly even censure.
We're not talking about taking a case from the local HOA that's run by douchebags but they're technically correct here. In cases with real stakes, where real shit is going down and lives are going to be effected, you are never arguing against yourself unless you are woefully incompetent and should never have been granted entry to the bar.
The third option is, of course, that you don't give a shit about anything but getting paid but at that point you have no core beliefs so none of this applies.
You know what, fair enough. I'm not an expert at law. This is what I thought was the case, but you seem more knowledgeable than me on this, so I'll take your word for it.
A good attorney can, but a great attorney doesn’t. Good attorneys make enough money that they can pick each and every case they want, and only take ones that advance their career or personal beliefs. My lawyer trained under Lenny Bruce, and his website right now is very similar to this letter. He runs his own firm, though, so he’s not beholden to the respectability politics of big law firms.
Edit: lmao I didn’t mean Lenny Bruce, listening to him while typing this fucked my brain up, but it’s hilarious so imma leave it.
Yikes
I'm a big advocate for considering Palestinians to be completely separate from Hamas, and that punishing civilians for the attack by cutting off crucial resources is unconscionable. If I were on a hiring committee, it would be for an engineering position, and I would strongly recommend against hiring them.
They have very pointedly not made a condemnation of the Hamas attack which killed innocent people and took them hostage. They liken that attack to legitimate Palestinian resistance, and they blame Israel for the actions of the terrorists, instead of the terrorists. This guy isn't losing the job offer for supporting Palestinian civilians. He's losing it for refusing to condemn murderers and the murders, and suggesting the terrorists are Palestine's resistance. And others have pointed out how he used his position of power inappropriately as a bully pulpit.
It's beyond clear that he'd be a terrible lawyer, and that he has a terrible morality. If he were an engineer, I wouldn't be able to trust his professional opinion to be separate from his personal one. If Israel was wanting to buy our green energy product, and the deal fell through, I couldn't know if he purposely tanked the deal or there were other issues. Not to mention, their causality is totally insane. When you have equipment failures or process events, if the reactor fails, the reactor fails. Something may have caused it to fail, but the reactor is still what failed, and you need to look into if the reactor design needs modification in some way. You can't say the root cause of the failure was something before the reactor and then totally ignore the reactor.
What a fucking idiot.
They have very pointedly not made a condemnation of the Hamas attack which killed innocent people and took them hostage.
Not only is there absolutely no condemnation - that entire text is a justification of the mass murder of 1,200 people.
Okay, liberal
Would you like to elaborate on why disliking the murder of innocents and the conflating of all Palestinians with Hamas is disagreeable to you?
As I chronicled elsewhere, I worked with an attorney that would spam antivaxx right-wing propaganda all over his fucking LinkedIn and he remains employed to this day.
People have a really fucking stupid notion of how lawyers actually behave in real life.
Well, different positions and different companies hold people to different standards.
Was your attorney a student body president at NYU?
I suggest you read the post I'm responding to. There is no such thing as an unbiased person, and attorneys are no different. Thinking otherwise is Hollywood bullshit, which is all most people know about lawyers.
I suggest you re-read the posts you’re replying to. The problem is not that a person has an opinion, the problem is not being able to choose where and when to express what degree of opinion and still think you should have a position at a white shoe kind of firm.
Everybody is biased. The question is can you put your biases aside for your job.
I could not, ergo I’m not a lawyer or in a role where that matters.
That's defeatist horseshit. You be a lawyer FOR your biases. You be a public defender. You work for the ACLU or EFF. You become a right-wing grifter and just start suing everyone for being woke. You become a lawyer specializing in IP so you can sue the shit out of infringers. You become a lawyer specializing in IP so you can sue the shit out of greedy-ass corporations.
All people are inherently biased and if you think you can't be an attorney because you're biased, fuck you. Get off your ass and be an attorney. You have no excuse except for the crushing debt and 6-7 years of coursework unless you've already completed a Bachelor's degree. Do it. Because some asshole on the internet told you to.
Hardly defeatist, as I really don’t want to be a lawyer. I have my dream job and feel blessed for it.
Screw that! Go spend $200k on law school! Get paid $40k a year as a PD! It's the new hip thing!
Why the fuck would someone want to be an attorney have you met them
If I were the head of a law firm, I wouldn't hire the idiot you're talking about or this guy. That doesn't mean nobody ever will, but it's not that shocking that one potential employers decided to pass. Nobody is obliged to hire him and he showed a pretty fundamental lack of judgement & ethics.
I had to deal with this during the pandemic. As the team lead, my ex-worker, exhausted and furious at the political climate, fired off a email to our client base. It doesn't matter if we agreed with the statement or not. But like, bro... we provide technical services.
I tried my best to step in front of the fire, brush it as a misstep and give them mental health days. But they went radioactive on the CEO and my boss and I had to let them go.
It's like that Dave Chappelle skit "when keeping it real goes wrong"