https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-supporters-probably-arent-fit-to-practice-law-1b42128d?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Dozens of law firms have signed an open letter to law-school deans warning that “anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms.” Earlier, Davis Polk & Wardwell had said it was reconsidering job offers to three Ivy League students who held leadership positions with organizations that signed letters supporting Hamas’s assault on Israel, and Winston & Strawn withdrew an offer to a New York University student who called the atrocities “necessary.”
The letter calls on the schools to affirm “the values we all hold dear” and reject “unreservedly that which is antithetical to those values.” It asserts that “there is no room for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism or any other form of violence, hatred or bigotry on your campuses, in our workplaces or our communities.” Weeks earlier the president of the University of Pennsylvania, jostled by donors into saying something emphatic, picked up the same script and said that “hateful speech that denigrates others” is “contrary to our values.”
But are the “values” of Sullivan & Cromwell the same as the “values” of Kirkland & Ellis, or of the University of Pennsylvania? Is there nothing in the distinct character of these institutions that can produce a moral response with edge and substance? The term “value judgment” came to us through Nietzsche and Max Weber, when people lost their confidence in speaking of moral truths and began to speak rather of the things they happened to “value,” which may not be what others “value.”
It was hardly controversial for the law firms to denounce “hatred or bigotry.” But what is it exactly that the law firms are enjoining the universities to do? The firms would doubtless assure the schools that they are against interfering with the freedom of the demonstrators to assemble and to speak.
