Dean: 2nd Circuit Judge Should Apologize for 'Anti-Social' Remark
Updated: As a longtime law professor and now dean, Erwin Chemerinsky is a regular on the pro bono scene. So when he read news reports that 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs was critical of the pro bono work orchestrated by law firms, he was taken aback.
More than that, Chemerinsky considered the remarks that Jacobs delivered during a Federalist Society event as “a slap in the face.”
Chemerinsky, in an op-ed appearing in the upcoming issue of the National Law Journal, challenged the assumption that pro bono work, and impact litigation in particular, is inherently liberal.
“Much pro bono work has no ideological content, such as in helping a victim of domestic violence get an essential restraining order or assisting a child with learning disabilities receive an adequate education,” Chemerinsky opines.
Chemerinsky, who is now the law school dean at the University of California at Irvine asks that Jacobs reconsider and apologize for his remarks. And if there’s no apology, Chemerinsky writes, “I hope that he is widely denounced for his misguided views.”
Judge Jacobs responded to Chemerinsky’s op-ed with a statement conveyed by a spokesman to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog: “Dean Chemerinsky’s article was evidently based on a newspaper article of my talk that grossly misstates what I said and think. Neither the National Law Journal nor Dean Chemerinsky have contacted me. I support, endorse and solicit pro bono work, and my talk said just that. The talk identifies abuses.”
The Federalist Society on Thursday posted the full text of the judge’s remarks. Jacobs started out the speech with an announcement that his words were meant to be provocative.
In a nutshell, he said, “much of what we call legal work for the public interest is essentially self-serving: Lawyers use public interest litigation to promote their own agendas, social and political–and (on a wider plane) to promote the power and the role of the legal profession itself. Lawyers and firms use pro bono litigation for training and experience. Big law firms use public interest litigation to assist their recruiting–to confer glamor on their work, and to give solace to overworked law associates. And it has been reported that some firms in New York City pay money to public-interest groups for the opportunity of litigating the cases that public-interest groups conceive on behalf of the clients they recruit.”
Jacobs later praises much of pro bono as being part of the “great tradition of American volunteerism.”
But, Jacobs concluded, in the realm of policy, “[W]e should as a profession consider dispassionately whether some public interest litigation has become an anti-social influence, whether the promotion of social and political agendas in the courts is in any real sense a service to the public, and whether the public interest would be best served by initiatives to abate somewhat the power of judges and lawyers and the legal profession as an interest group.”
Last updated 4:05 p.m. Oct. 23 to add a link to the full text of Judge Jacobs’ speech.
