At a $500-a-head fundraiser in Charleston, South Carolina yesterday, Ashley Williams, a Black Lives Matter activist, confronted Hillary Clinton about her support for the 1994 Crime Bill as well as for her comments at the time parroting the racist media hype that some youth were “superpredators” who needed to be brought to “heel.” Clinton — who in a public speech in Harlem in the past weeks said that “White Americans need to do a better job at listening when African Americans talk about the seen and unseen barriers they face every day… practice humility rather than assume that our experience is everyone’s experiences” — did not answer the protestor’s questions, acquiesced the crowd’s boos, allowed someone to escort the protestor out of the mansion, and then said, “Now let’s get back to the issues.” See the video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqLfvQfuvsA

There is a lot that is going to be said about this clip, which should be widely seen. It’s best for others to comment about what this clip says about the Black Lives Matter movement or Hillary Clinton’s campaign. However, I will say this: this incident is a perfect example of the campaign finance system’s distortion of politics.

Take a look at this photo of the crowd:

Now remember: ~50% — half! — of Democratic voters in South Carolina are black. In Charleston, ~28% of residents are black and since ~50% of Charleston is Republican (and if racial party demographics are similar across the state), one can assume about ~50% — half! — of Democratic voters in Charleston are black. And yet, at this precious hour of a candidate’s time in the rare week-long window when the candidate cares about this state, there are barely any black faces in the crowd.

The average black Charlestonian makes $22,000 less per year than the average white Charlestonian ($37k to $15k). The annualized living wage in Charleston (not counting childcare) is ~$24,000, which goes to show how much more more disposable income the average white Charlestonian has than the average black Charlestonian. So, its understandable why this crowd looks the way it does: when you charge $500 to have an intimate meeting with a candidate, you are saying “for this event, I only want to speak to folks with disposable income” and consequently selecting for a tremendously whiter crowd than your electorate.

When that happens, it changes the dynamics of your events. If this was a crowd resembling Clinton’s electorate — and half the faces in the mansion were black — the crowd might not have booed as hard and Clinton might not have been as dismissive. Perhaps someone would have even stood up for Ashley Williams for raising the same point that Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates have raised. But, the nearly all-white crowd likely never experienced their children being called ‘superpredators’ or had their neighborhoods ravaged by mass incarceration. So, they were unable to — as Clinton, in her Harlem speech weeks ago, challenged us to be able to — “practice humility rather than assume that our experience is everyone’s experiences.”

Even if this protestor had not been present, it still would have been a distortive event. The wealthiest Charleston Democrats would have asked Clinton questions and expressed their concerns, distorting her view of what the popular sentiment is to the view of what the wealthiest’s sentiment is. The needs and hopes of the vast majority of her electorate would have been unheard for the hour, because they could not have afforded to speak them. Eventually, no matter how detached a candidate is from such events, one cannot steep in wealthy rooms for so long without being affected by their narrow discourse.

This is not Hillary Clinton’s fault. She probably didn’t want to go to a mansion last night and speak to the whims of the wealthiest Democrats in Charleston. Judging by the popular understanding of her, she probably wanted to curl up and read some public policy journal instead. But, because our system requires you to run two campaigns — one for everybody and one for the wealthiest 0.23% who give $200+ to campaigns each year — she had to go to this mansion. And that means that half of the time she is held accountable to everybody and the other half of the time she’s held accountable to a donor class that skews sharply rich, white and male.

There should only be one campaign: for votes, not for dollars. If there was only one campaign, Clinton would have seen Williams as a representative of a larger public sentiment rather than as a rogue individual. If there was only one campaign, going to a North Charleston community center last night would have been as useful to Clinton as going to this mansion. If there was only one campaign, Clinton would never find herself in a South Carolina room with hardly any black faces.

In her Harlem speech, entitled Breaking Down Barriers, Clinton decried “places where people of color and the poor have been left out and left behind” and unveiled a $125 billion plan to help impoverished black Americans. This is likely a great plan, but political outputs are not enough. Without changing political inputs, the poor and marginalized are forced to rely on enlightened insiders to always come to the rescue. The place where people of color and the poor have been most left out and left behind is in our democracy. The walls of the mansion fundraiser are the first barriers we should break down.

The Harvard Law Record published an essay I wrote calling on how: (i) law students cannot adequately learn to “think like a lawyer” if the 1L curriculum provides no experiences with the reality of the legal system; and (ii) how a visiting professor’s student prison trip program blazes a trail for an alternative, experiential curriculum:

It is often said that the purpose of Harvard Law School’s 1L curriculum is to prepare each student to “think like a lawyer.”  It would be much more accurate to say that the present curriculum aims to prepare each student to think like an attorney. The distinction is rarely articulated to students: an attorney is a legal representative to a specific client, while a lawyeris a member and caretaker of the legal profession, tasked with serving the justice system and advancing its public interest mission. Solely understanding important cases involving the major areas of law (Contracts, Torts, etc.) may be sufficient to “think like an attorney,” but if Harvard Law is interested in also helping each student to “think like a lawyer,” we must expand our 1L curriculum beyond solely case studies to include direct experience with the realities of the justice system.

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Similarly, in the present arrangement, Harvard Law cannot ensure that its degree-holders have ever visited a prison, met an asylum-seeker, or saw what a public defender’s office looks like relative to that of a white collar defense firm. Voluntary elements of the Harvard Law experience are often sorted by what we were already predisposed to be interested in, resulting in the most important learning experiences — the future prison reformer hearing from a victims advocacy group, the future prosecutor learning from a formerly incarcerated person, the future corporate interest lawyer experiencing a union meeting or a visit with victims of corporate malfeasance, and the future government regulator meeting a startup entrepreneur — never happening. If we believe those experiences are necessary to “think like a lawyer” in 21st century America and if a Harvard Law degree is supposed to signify that its holders have been through the experiences necessary to “think like a lawyer,” then the curriculum of Harvard Law should incorporate those experiences. In short, we should put our mandatory 1L curriculum where our mouth is.

Read the full essay — Follow Professor King’s Lead: Without Experience with Legal Realities, 1Ls Left Unprepared to “Think Like A Lawyer” — here at The Harvard Law Record.

My Harvard Law Record essay on promoting civic-minded legal vocations has been adapted for Aeon:

In early 1969, Ralph Nader placed an ad in the Harvard Crimsoncalling on law students to apply to work with him to investigate various federal agencies. The group of young lawyers would become known as ‘Nader’s Raiders’: an iconic posse aiming to shake up Washington in the name of ‘the public interest’ (an old phrase they would come to repopularise). The next summer, thousands of students from prominent law schools, including a third of Harvard Law School’s student body, applied for 200 positions. They wanted to be, as Nader explained to Life magazine, a ‘new generation of lawyers’ who would be a civic-minded counterforce to a system where ‘all the lawyers are on the corporation’s side’.

Four decades later, the millennial generation of lawyers, by the numbers, looks less like the new generation of public-interest lawyers that Nader was rallying and more like the generation of corporate lawyers he was aiming to counterbalance. At the top five ranked law schools in the United States, only 9 per cent of the class of 2014 pursued public-interest work after graduation. Only 15 per cent of Yale Law School’s class of 2016 spent their 2L summer working for justice-centred organisations. For every Harvard Law School graduate of 2014 who pursued work designed – as the school’s mission statement impels – ‘to contribute to the advancement of justice’, five graduates joined corporate-interest firms. In fact, the 1960s’ public-interest fervour has faded so much that more students from the top five ranked law schools went to work for Nader himself in 1970 than took up postgraduate employment with any public-interest organisation in 2014.

Read the whole essay — The first thing we do is nudge the lawyers — here at Aeon.

The Harvard Law Record published a piece I wrote exposing the complicity of Harvard Law School’s Office of Career Services in the regulatory revolving door culture among D.C. lawyers:

The OCS-endorsed recommendation reads like a corrupted version of President Kennedy’s inaugural address. Instead of calling young people to work for the federal government by challenging them to “ask what you can do for your country,” the Office of Career Services at the law school of Kennedy’s university is directing students to statements that call students to work two-to-three years for the federal government by challenging them to ask what you can do to gain knowledge and skills for deep pocketed future clients. “The federal government,” Point 12 reads, “is a great place to gain practical experience and training.” Indeed, the school whose mission is “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and well-being of society” frames government work no longer as service to our national community, but rather as experience to be strategically monetized.

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America does not need young law students working for our national government with the mindset that they will bring the intel they learn there back to serve powerful interests.  If our nation’s oldest law school is going to recommend people to go into government work, it should only be in the context of entering such work as a public servant with our national community’s interest in mind while one works there.

Read the full exposé — End OCS’ Complicity in D.C.’s Revolving Door Corruption — here at The Harvard Law Record.

The Harvard Law Record just published my letter to my classmates regarding launching civic-minded vocations.  The letter is copied below:

Dear Harvard Law School Class of 2018,

Harvard Law School’s stated mission is “to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and well being of society.” Every January, when the sun sets early and corporate interest law firms flock to campus to wine and dine us, that mission can fade to the background.  It is important that we do not let the hustle and bustle of Big Law receptions crowd out the reason we are here: to launch not prestigious careers, but rather transformative vocations that serve to advance justice and societal well-being.

There exist great civic challenges of our time. One in four American children grow up in poverty. Our nation’s Congress has been corrupted by money. A warming globe threatens humanity’s most vulnerable.  One in three of our black male neighbors will be locked in prison at some point in their life. These challenges need all hands on deck. These challenges need the Harvard Law School Class of 2018.

We came to law school to develop a skill with a proven track record of tackling great challenges such as these. In winter, though, as we are shuffled from corporate interest reception to corporate interest reception, doubting questions cloud our memory:

If most students are going into corporate interest law, it must be crazy to pursue a different path, right?

If legal work designed to serve those without money is — as one professor recently told our class — “the Lord’s work” and I am no martyr, am I not fit to pursue it?

If serving the interests of a wealthy and powerful few can provide stability to my life, but serving the interests of the public will require periods of uncertainty, would it be best for me to play it safe?

As these doubts grow bigger with each passing winter night, it becomes easy to ignore the civic challenges calling us and forget the reasons we came here in the first place. Left to its own devices, the creeping belief that there is no alternative but using our skills to serve wealthy interests will take hold of us. Our ambitions to build transformative vocations will be suppressed and delayed. Our dreams of living Big Lives will be shrunk to the consolations of Big Law: “…there will be some pro bono work, I guess…” “…wealthy folks need lawyers, too, you know…” and“…maybe later…”

We must remember, though, when we find a quiet moment during these snowy, winter nights and contemplate what we want to labor for during our brief and precious time here on this Earth, that there is always an alternative. It is an alternative that we are blessed to have had so many Harvard Law alumni take up: to trade the prestigious certainty of corporate advocacy for the transformative citizenship of contributing to the advancement of justice and well being of society. To name just few:

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1992, Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project, a non-profit worker center, which organizes immigrant workers and fights for stronger state labor protection laws.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1970, Mark Green spent the Seventies publishing various books on reigning in corporate power, culminating in his founding of the New Democracy Project, a public policy institute.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2010, Gina Clayton founded the Essie Justice Group to support and empower women with incarcerated loved ones to help end mass incarceration.

Gordon, Green, and Clayton — as well as hundreds of their fellow citizens over the years who pursued a civic-minded vocation right out of Harvard Law School — faced the same winter of doubt that we face today. But they listened to that voice that drew them to law school in the first place: we have a mission to serve, we have great challenges to tackle, we have skills to deploy in service of our human community and we cannot let fear of uncertainty distract us.

Unfortunately, for every 2014 Harvard Law graduate who pursued work in organizations designed “to contribute to the advancement of justice and well being of society,” four graduates joined firms designed to serve wealthy clients’ interests. We, the Class of 2018, can take a different path. We can have a higher estimation of our own civic significance. We can survive this winter with our vocations intact.

Sincerely,
Pete Davis

Read the full letter — A Mission in Winter — here at The Harvard Law Record.

The Harvard Law Record just published my open letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow regarding Harvard Law School’s failure to mainstream civic-minded career building and what Professor Cass Sunstein’s theories of choice architecture can teach us about how to turn the tide:

Harvard Law School’s stated mission is ‘to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well being of society.’ Implicit in this mission is the policy objective of increasing the number of Harvard Law School students who choose to pursue civic-minded careers serving the public interest. We, as a community, are seriously failing to meet this objective. For every Class of 2014 graduate who immediately pursued public interest work in organizations designed to contribute to “the advancement of justice and the well being of society,” five graduates pursued monied interest work with a corporation or law firm. Sunstein’s ideas about choice architecture and default options can help explain this failure.

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As one would predict after reading Sunstein’s work, the setting of corporate interest careerism as the default option for Harvard Law students allows subtle deference, loss aversion and inertia biases to nudge us into corporate-minded careers: we subconsciously interpret corporate interest employment as the institutionally endorsed option; we feel that opting out of corporate interest work is a loss of a loan repayment option (high starting salaries) that we have been endowed; and the extra effort needed to opt into the special, public interest path dissuades us from doing so.

Read the full letter — Change HLS’ Default Option to Civic-Minded Career Building — here at The Harvard Law Record.