Twitter. Generally speaking, it is terrible. One would not think that 280 characters would be enough to reveal an individual’s depraved mind/heart/soul, and yet such revelations seemingly happen every minute on the platform frequently described by users as a #hellsite. And yet despite frequent tweaks by Jack Dorsey and the rest of the Twitter braintrust, it seems as if the most basic requests from users are being ignored, such as “When are you going to implement an edit feature?” and “Can you please get rid of the Nazis?” One would think the fact that I feel like I am walking into a cesspool of hatred each time I go to the site would curb, or at the very least deter, my usage. That would be incorrect. I, shamefully, admit that Twitter is basically an appendage at this point. Rare is the quiet moment when I don’t instinctively reach for my phone and see what has changed in the world over the past fifteen seconds.
Now in my defense, for all of its numerous, well-documented, flaws, if used properly, Twitter is the best news aggregator on the planet. As someone who consumed news online prior to Twitter’s advent, I would have a hard time explaining to anyone under the age of, say, 29 what it was like to keep abreast of the day’s events in the early 2000s. “So first you would go to the New York Times website, read something there, then try to remember that the URL for ESPN included go.com, for some reason, and several hours later, you would have read three stories and been done for the day.” In addition to its positive attributes as an aggregator, Twitter is probably the only place on the internet, or really in the world, where you can watch real-time de-escalation of armed conflict between highly militarized nation-states.
Not to mention how there are few other platforms, social media or otherwise, where one could parlay a reputation as a troll to not just an ambassadorship to a major ally, but to the Director of National Intelligence despite having no real qualifications for the job.
And while we can debate if Twitter is, in fact, reflective of real life or, instead, it’s own bubble, I think few would argue with the idea that many big issues are being debated and new ideas being offered up in 280 character chunks. This is especially true on the political left, which tends to dominate my own Twitter feed. In a since-deleted tweet, Vox Senior Correspondent Ian Milhiser said that one of the “stories in liberal politics right now is that jobs like banking, consulting, and big law that used to be viewed as morally neutral are increasingly seen as immoral.”[1] Before diving into these comments, let me start by saying I am a great admirer of Milhiser’s work and his writing on the Supreme Court. In addition, a circumspect view of Biglaw by political liberals is not just limited to this tweet. The progressive organization Demand Justice (full disclosure: Senior Counsel Katie O’Connor is a friend a former colleague) released a sensational list of potential Supreme Court justices for a Democratic administration last year — give me Karlan, Krasner, and Stevenson, and American jurisprudence would be fundamentally transformed, for the better, in short order — but absent from the list was anyone who had been a Biglaw partner [2] or served as corporate in-house counsel. This was not an oversight or a coincidence, but rather purposeful as the organization seeks to end the appointment of “corporate judges.”
I understand the impulse with such a stance. A bipartisan trend in recent years has been the path to the bench, or even the popular definition of “success” in the legal profession, has been singular: attend an elite law school, clerk for a federal judge, work in Biglaw, and if you leave the private sector, become a prosecutor or go in-house. To be clear, that is a perfectly acceptable, and likely highly profitable, legal career. But it is not, and should not, be the only path for young attorneys. Plus, a judicial branch stocked to the brim with homogenous professional backgrounds — not to mention the more recent phenomenon of homogenous personal traits — leads to worse judicial outcomes. The bench needs more jurists like Jane Kelly of the Eighth Circuit (also on the Demand Justice shortlist), who attended Harvard Law and completed not one, but two, federal clerkships, but who then spent 19 years as an assistant federal public defender. A diversity of professional experience will better inform the judiciary and the opinions it renders.
But while I get the impulse, deeming Biglaw and in-house opportunities as intrinsically immoral is a bridge too far for me. There are a couple of reasons why liberals should not shun these attorneys. First and foremost, doing so is a form of economic privilege. As even nonlawyers/law students who have spent approximately 30 seconds on this website will know, law school is a rather expensive proposition. The majority of law students, especially those at “top” schools, take out six-figure loans in order to earn their J.D. While loan forgiveness is an option for those who go the public interest route, its requirements can be onerous and lock you into a certain career path without allowing much deviation. And oh, by the way, the current administration would like to end the program. Without loan forgiveness, the only option most students see to avoid several decades of debt is to pay off their loans with a Biglaw salary. If the political left is telling these law students that they will be persona non grata, in essence, the message is that only those who come from money are welcome into liberal legal circles and feted for judicial appointments. This strikes me as anathema to everything that political liberalism stands for.
Second, young attorneys can gain outstanding experience from even a short stint in Biglaw that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. I have said before, and still maintain, that pound for pound, the best experience a young attorney can get is via a clerkship. But the level of experience one gets in Biglaw is not that far behind. They are a litany of matters one will work on and large firms wouldn’t be paying top dollar to junior associates if they were expecting poor work product, so the standards that young attorneys have to meet are quite high. In addition to paying clients, there can also be a litany of pro bono matters that allow junior associates to not only work on matters that are of personal interest, but to perform tasks that are typically reserved for more experienced members of the firm, e.g., take depositions, examine witnesses, etc.
All of this is not to say that Biglaw or other corporate legal positions are the path for every law student. In fact, for some students it is absolutely the wrong path. But for the left to ostracize those who ever deigned to work in a for-profit legal entity is to cast out many of the attorneys who will help transform, for the better, the judiciary and likely the legal profession writ large.
[1] Since nothing ever dies on the internet, I was able to capture the bulk of this deleted tweet and quote it here, however, there is language preceding “stories” in the tweet at issue that I was not able to find. If I recall correctly from when the tweet initially popped up on my feed, the full tweet referred to it as the biggest story or the most undercovered story. Either way, the thrust of the tweet is unchanged.
[2] Important to note that Demand Justice does not categorize those who worked in Biglaw as an associate, rather than a partner, as someone who would be disqualified under their standard.
The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Vanderbilt University or Law School.
Nicholas Alexiou is the Director of LL.M. and Alumni Advising as well as the Associate Director of Career Services at Vanderbilt University Law School. He will, hopefully, respond to your emails at abovethelawcso@gmail.com.