Clarence Thomas Turned Supreme Court Service Into An ATM Machine

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Greetings again. Hey, to another episode of Thinking Like. A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice for

Kathryn Rubino:

Hi, Joe Patrice.

Joe Patrice:

That is Kathryn Rubino, who also works here for now.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, you think you have some authority? Hilarious.

Joe Patrice:

No, it’s just Wish Casting and Chris Williams is also in there. We do this show every week to talk about the big stories in law from the week that was over at Above. the Law. And we begin as usual with a little bit of small talk.

Chris Williams:

Small talk.

Joe Patrice:

So what is up with folks?

Kathryn Rubino:

I did a brunch on this weekend, which Oh,

Joe Patrice:

How lovely.

Kathryn Rubino:

It was really lovely. Okay. That’s aggressive. But I had some tasty

Chris Williams:

Fight, fight

Kathryn Rubino:

Tasty Eggs and Brie and one of the best little hash brown patty things that I’ve had. I was at the egg shop in the city and just a little tasty treat.

Chris Williams:

Are you a big Brie person?

Kathryn Rubino:

I love Brie. I mean, I love most cheese, to be honest.

Chris Williams:

Are you concerned with Brie going the way of the Dodo?

Kathryn Rubino:

No, I wasn’t. Should I be?

Chris Williams:

Yeah, apparently there’s a thing where they’re saying the cultures for Bri are dying out. I think because of memory serves because of antibiotic use, but I could be wrong, but it tracks. So yeah, if you’re out there, I think it’s Brie and some other cheese. It looks

Joe Patrice:

Like it’s Cam and Bear.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay. Yeah. Cam and Bear and Bri are, yeah,

Joe Patrice:

It’s like the cultures have been inbred, so they’re not, it’s basically the habsburgs of cheese cultures.

Kathryn Rubino:

Wow. Okay. I have a related trivia question. Okay. What Broadway musical references both Camon Bear and Brie in a lyric next to each other?

Joe Patrice:

No, we’re not doing this.

Chris Williams:

Is it by a South Park writer?

Kathryn Rubino:

No, no. It

Chris Williams:

Would’ve been cooler if it

Kathryn Rubino:

Was the same song. Also references Supreme Court Justice

Joe Patrice:

Brandeis. Oh, that is Brandeis.

Kathryn Rubino:

Before he was on the court, the high court. He was a judge at the time. You definitely should be able to get this

Chris Williams:

Joe I in. Not then, not much, but some.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, it was a period piece. The musical,

Joe Patrice:

I mean, obviously

Kathryn Rubino:

It wasn’t written contemporaneously is what I’m saying. At least not the musical version, but the original source material for the musical may have been, that’s significantly

Joe Patrice:

Older. I had a guess before. You said it was before. Brandeis is on the Supreme Court now. I’m really struggling.

Kathryn Rubino:

What did you think it was?

Joe Patrice:

I mean, I figured it would be like an

Kathryn Rubino:

Annie or something. It is Annie. It

Joe Patrice:

Is Annie. Okay. So he was not only on the Supreme Court, he was about to die.

Kathryn Rubino:

Not when the show is set, because the line is Judge Brandeis not

Joe Patrice:

Justice. He joined the Supreme Court in 1918.

Kathryn Rubino:

Did he really? Yeah. Or

Joe Patrice:

1916. I’m sorry I was wrong. But still, nonetheless, 1916 far before.

Kathryn Rubino:

Fair enough. The line in the show, in the song is Judge Brandeis, which is why I, because I would’ve thought it’d be justice, but

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, that was going to be my guest until you dropped that. And then I was like, I knew he was in a pointee long before all of that

Kathryn Rubino:

Sort of stuff. Fair enough.

Joe Patrice:

But yeah, anyway. Great. I’m so glad we went through all that. You

Kathryn Rubino:

Should be. It is both fecal and small in the talking,

Chris Williams:

Not to mention cheesy.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh God, I’m so proud of

Chris Williams:

That. I’m so proud.

Joe Patrice:

We’ve lost control of the show, everybody.

Kathryn Rubino:

I’m sorry. No, just you.

Chris Williams:

Everybody else is fine.

Joe Patrice:

It was the royal we. Alright, so I am going to,

Kathryn Rubino:

He’s talking to the audience.

Joe Patrice:

I am. Oh, you’re

Kathryn Rubino:

Not even saying what you did this weekend or letting Chris have

Joe Patrice:

Change. I’m afraid our time is up. That’s an

Kathryn Rubino:

Arbitrary distinction. I

Joe Patrice:

Don’t think

Chris Williams:

Joe usually never tells what he does with his life. I will say my quick thing. I’ve been looking into Mo

Joe Patrice:

Be interest. Tapping the sign. Tapping the sign, the sound. Sound. I,

Kathryn Rubino:

That is completely arbitrary and I’m glad you’re on your moisturizing journey, Chris.

Chris Williams:

Moist Anite rock. But I mean, I probably should moisturize more, but

Joe Patrice:

Nobody loves the word moist more than me.

Kathryn Rubino:

No.

Chris Williams:

Okay. Tapping the sign now we’re done.

Kathryn Rubino:

No, now you’ve quorum. Two, three.

Joe Patrice:

Well, no, I actually have never thought about it. It just seems like a word to me, but I gather people are very uncomfortable by that word, and so I try to use it as often as possible because it makes people very uncomfortable,

Kathryn Rubino:

Real dick. That’s why

Chris Williams:

You’re such a joy at parties.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Well, I mean, yeah, I feel like making people feel a little off their game. It works to my advantage.

Kathryn Rubino:

I like that. Pretend like you’re this master mastermind Machiavellian character. It’s

Chris Williams:

Like Drake. I’m deliberately a dick that way.

Joe Patrice:

Drake even, I don’t know, as though Drake is deliberately anything at this point. He seems pretty beat up and battered from the conversations we had a few weeks ago.

Chris Williams:

Another comparison.

Joe Patrice:

Anyway, I’m not Canadian. Anyway, so with all that said, let’s get to the actual topics at hand. The first one, we have to talk about financial disclosures. We have some financial disclosures.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, it’s kind of a story. The first is that the most recent set of financial disclosures are out, which included some amendments by Clarence Thomas because he was caught,

Joe Patrice:

Oh wait, some amendments. So is it possible his earlier disclosures had mistakes in them?

Kathryn Rubino:

Certainly omissions.

Joe Patrice:

I’m sure minor omissions are a thing. I’m sure it’s a small number.

Kathryn Rubino:

Millions of dollars. It’s okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing too is that our friends at Fix the court put together a list actually detailing the total value of these gifts, not just the ones that were on the financial disclosures over the last 20 years, though they include them, but likely gifts that ProPublica and other media sources have sort of pieced together, almost certainly in Undervaluation. And they come up with some disturbing, I’ll say numbers, which the total value of the gifts given to the Supreme Court over the last 20 years is 6.5, almost $6.6 million.

Joe Patrice:

Oh,

Kathryn Rubino:

Here’s the real kicker of that big number. The total amount of gifts and likely gifts that Clarence Thomas received just him. That would be 5.8, almost $5.9 million. Wow. So most of them. So as much as we might get a little irritated at folks like Alito taking these luxury trips, courtesy of various interest groups, we really have to remember it is absolutely a drop in the corruption bucket. It is a staggering number. And I think it’s interesting because these stories obviously have been around for a minute. We’ve been talking to them probably a year and a half, something in that neighborhood amount of time, and they just kind of come up in drips and drabs because that’s the nature of uncovering information that people wanted to keep hidden. So there hasn’t been sort of one massive, this is every gift Clarence Thomas has received. So you get them in spits and spats and you hear about them over time. But for fix the court to get together and be like, let’s actually tally up every story, no matter who broke it. Not just sometimes as media we’re self interested and focus on the ones that we may have broken or written about or something like that. This is all of them altogether. And I think that that was a real service and that number is shocking.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Alright. So Clarence Thomas, we knew that we wrote stories. The ProPublica thing found that there were like half a million dollars of bad stuff and then the drips drops. Now we’re upwards of 4.8 or whatever it is. Is that, what’s the number?

Kathryn Rubino:

No, six. It’s 5.8 almost

Joe Patrice:

5.9. I thought it’s 5.2 out of the sick.

Kathryn Rubino:

No, it’s 5.8. The numbers. So there were tweet that went viral, just included the actual gifts. But when you actually look at the chart that fix the law, does they include gifts and likely gifts? So I’m talking now about the inclusive of the likely gift number. That’s both the 6.6 number, which is the total number of gifts and likely gifts and of the gifts and likely gifts. Clarence Thomas has 5.8, almost 5.9.

Joe Patrice:

Wow. Yeah. It’s just the level of graft. Well, and also look, it’s bad enough that we have a Supreme Court justice who’s taking $5.8 million in gifts, but also the way in which this is stuff that this comes out of amended reports. So these are gifts that he was attempting to not tell anyone about.

Kathryn Rubino:

A large amount of them. Yes. This is inclusive of every gift, including ones that were potentially reported. This number is everything he got over the last 20 years as far as we know as the public right

Joe Patrice:

Now. Now remember, one of his big excuses early on was these were minimus gifts that he got from friends. So he didn’t have to report them because they’re small. A friend giving him a couple of bucks here and there. I don’t know, as though I’ve not calculated how many drinks have been bought for me by a buddy over the last 20 years. But I’m going to go in and say that I don’t think I could get to 5.8 million.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that’s bold.

Joe Patrice:

I don’t know as though I would How

Kathryn Rubino:

Much Pap Van Winkle are you drinking?

Joe Patrice:

Well, fair. I just don’t know as though I could come up with a way in which I could, anything remotely involving any shame on my part say to the world when I know I’ve taken $5.8 million that it’s been a series of minimus small gifts.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, sure. I think that there was an important qualifier there that is not applicable to Justice Thomas. And that is shame.

Joe Patrice:

The lack and the shame. Yeah. So obviously this story comes out, it becomes a big story. Even the mainstream media picks it up. I saw one major outlet leading with how Thomas has taken millions of dollars another with millions of dollars. And then I saw Fox News had a different headline. What was that though?

Kathryn Rubino:

I don’t think I’ve been tracking.

Joe Patrice:

Well, they were also covering the financial disclosures.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh. So yeah, I think fun little detail that was in the most recent set of financial disclosures is Justice Jackson received, I think it’s $3,700 worth of Beyonce tickets from Beyonce.

Joe Patrice:

Right. She got a Beyonce ticket. Well, you said

Chris Williams:

$300,000?

Kathryn Rubino:

No, three. 3000, 3,700. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Something like that. Yeah. Roughly 4,000. I was going to say the

Chris Williams:

Same joke. One ticket,

Kathryn Rubino:

I think it was three. But

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I think

Kathryn Rubino:

It was, and that’s face value

Joe Patrice:

Four. And they were roughly a thousand each. So yeah, that’s

Kathryn Rubino:

How we get there. And obviously it’s face value. Those tickets had she decided to put ’em on the secondary market would be a lot more expensive. But you know what? Hey, Beyonce does not have any interests currently before the Supreme Court. So W

Joe Patrice:

Certainly makes things better. Look, I’m not altogether sure. I would have taken these tickets. I probably would have, if I were a justice, I probably would’ve paid for either the, maybe not face value, whatever, some sort of value of worth, maybe exclusive of ticket master prices or something like that. Because we know what’s going on there. I would’ve paid Beyonce some manner of money for it. Obviously I’m getting a perk to the extent that it’s probably hard to get a Beyonce ticket without her help, but I would not take it for free. It would probably be the right ethical move. But also this in the grand scheme of ethical failings is very low when somebody else has taken $5.8 million

Kathryn Rubino:

And first of all, disclosed it in the first instance,

Joe Patrice:

Which is also true, disclosed it, not tried to hide it,

Kathryn Rubino:

Did not try to hide it, actually disclosed it. And again, unlike plenty of the figures that have given Clarence Thomas and Justice Alito gifts throughout the last 20 years, does not currently have any cases before that are likely to see the Supreme Court.

Joe Patrice:

Sure. Although, I mean, I don’t love that standard. I mean, I think that’s a very huge and important standard. But I don’t love that standard because I also think there are a lot of disingenuous actors who are not. I also think it cuts certain ways, right on the right. It is very possible to not be a litigant, but have business to the extent that a lot of the way corporations work in this world, it is possible to be a shareholder in something and not directly involved and therefore have business unquote before the court or be in an industry that’s being regulated by a litigant who is not you and have business in that way. I think it’s possible for on the right to get around the business before the court rule in ways that are still ethically shady, but get around it. So that’s why I don’t love that

Kathryn Rubino:

Standard. Agreed. Agreed. And I don’t think it’s necessarily the standard, but I think when assessing a reported gift, it is certainly a useful bit of information.

Joe Patrice:

Sure, definitely. But yes, Fox News has made that their headline, their big takeaway was Beyonce tickets. They seem to be less concerned about the 5.8 million.

Kathryn Rubino:

That weird. Yeah. Yeah. Weird. I mean just the capper is nothing will be done about any of these things. Sure.

Joe Patrice:

Alright. Summer associate season has begun, this is one of our favorite times of the year here at Above. the Law because we often get fun stories from you all out there in the TIF network, the people who are working in these big law firms. You have a bunch of law students who have crawled out of the library and decided to start three hour lunches with you and somebody will do something embarrassing. Will it be as embarrassing as jumping into the Hudson River? Probably.

Kathryn Rubino:

Probably not. Probably not. That’s a real story for our younger listeners or people maybe who weren’t as familiar with, what is this? Like a 2010 story, something like that. 2009. It was a while ago.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

So early aughts and a summer associate. Late aughts. Yeah, late aughts. Summer associate jumped into the Hudson River. That’s a real story

Chris Williams:

For shingles or

Joe Patrice:

Drunk. Drunk at a party, took off our clothes and jumped into the river, had to be saved by the Coast Guard. So that story is obviously a big one, but we’ve had others. We’ve had summer associates, punch associates, we’ve had summer associates.

Chris Williams:

That’s far more reasonable.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. We’ve had attempted hitting on a partner’s wife. We’ve had mooning from one. So we have some great stories. And I’ll

Kathryn Rubino:

Put a pin right there and say, if you have similar stories, the email address you should be sending these to is tips at Above the Law dot com. We keep all of our tips. There’s strictly confidential.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. But we have a tip that’s out there. I think somebody first put this on fishbowl and it got a little bit of attention and people correctly then alerted us. There is a summer associate out there in New York who is showing up to some Vault 50 firm, it was unnamed in this, but is showing up to work every day in a horse and carriage.

Kathryn Rubino:

Why?

Joe Patrice:

Okay. That’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Not even the most efficient way to get to work.

Joe Patrice:

So it’s not they,

Chris Williams:

I need them to be Amish.

Joe Patrice:

Apparently. There is no hint of irony in this. They just are doing this now. I will say, I think that there’s something to, in their defense, you’re in New York, this is your Cinderella moment. Of course you show up in a horse

Kathryn Rubino:

And carriage mean it’s particularly cruel, right.

Joe Patrice:

Well, yes. Alright. So putting aside the

Kathryn Rubino:

Animal cruelty

Joe Patrice:

Aspect of this, the continued debate over whether or not handsome calves are cruel or not, it’s a quintessentially New York experience. If you are not, or you say a law student not from New York who’s in New York just for the summer associate gig, potentially one who doesn’t think you’re going to end up at that firm over the long haul, knock yourself out, take a carriage to work, whatever. I don’t know.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think you’re way more sympathetic than you need to be to this. It is a slow way to get to work for sure. I don’t know. It’s not like you can take a handsome carriage ride from all the way uptown to all the way. It’s like a pretty limited, even feasibility wise, it just seems this is

Joe Patrice:

Somebody who probably has an apartment on the other side of Central Park from where the firm’s office is. And

Chris Williams:

What I need to happen is for this person, no, I will twerk them. I them to not get the job offer then complain this was discrimination. Like, no, you rode a fucking horse and buddy into work every day.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, it’s not, I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with it. I think it’s a little goofy. I think that, well, they’re

Chris Williams:

Horsing around on the job.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. You don’t necessarily want to have the reputation as somebody standing out like that. But hey,

Kathryn Rubino:

If you’re as horse girl, yeah, that’s bad.

Joe Patrice:

Right? We don’t know as though it’s a woman either. My sure.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, sure. Horse boy. Not better. Not better.

Chris Williams:

Horse

Joe Patrice:

They horse they, yeah. Still not better. Listen, alright, we don’t need to get into the gender politics of this. I just think that, I don’t know, it is not something I would do. I made fun of it as a thing, as one should, but I also don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world. I

Kathryn Rubino:

Mean, it’s not the worst. I mean, it’s not like they’re writing it off to the firm or something super ridiculous like that. But it we know of just seemed like

Joe Patrice:

That we know of.

Kathryn Rubino:

I guess that’s fair. But why you’re a summer associate, you’re not working over the weekend to do this on your own time when you don’t have all of your colleagues looking at you.

Joe Patrice:

I think that’s fair.

Kathryn Rubino:

This reminds me, when I was a summer associate, there was a pool party at one of the partner’s houses, and I remember a bunch of senior associates talking to several of us being like, I would never wear a bathing suit to any work events where something casual. But I don’t participate in the pool aspect of it because you don’t want, people will never forget what you look like in these non-professional contexts. So always remember, if you’re dealing with people with work, they’re always the people you’re going to have to work with at the end of the day. So most of us did not participate in the pool aspect. It’s one of those things where you have to work with these people. They’re always going to have this image in their head of you in a handsome cap that it’s not the most professional image that you want people to call to mind when they think of you.

Joe Patrice:

Tell that to Santa Claus.

Kathryn Rubino:

First of all, there’s a big difference between magical reindeer and horses that are forced to walk in New York City. And I know you said put a pin in the animal law aspect of it, but it’s not a great look and potentially problematic for plenty of your colleagues. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

I did not expect us to veer in this conversation outside of small talk. This is riveting stuff

Joe Patrice:

And hopefully listeners agree. All right. The last big deal that’s been going on over the last week is the Columbia Law review. If you have tried to look at them online, actually you can look at the website now, but for several days you could not. Then the website just didn’t exist. Wild. So why did Columbia Law review’s website disappear?

Chris Williams:

Well, it depends on who you ask. Great question. There was a author who decided to write about the nakba, I’m not sure actually, I’m going to try to say it. And a legal context theorizing about it in a way that was maybe something parallel to, but different from how we talk about genocide generally wanted, the thing about is his own thing. And Harvard Law was going to hold us a thing, but then they pulled the piece, Columbia reached out, he wrote something similar, they Columbia Law review published it, but then Columbia Law reviews board of directors didn’t just pull it, they nuked the whole website because if you’re going to rip up a little bit, might as well rip the whole thing. And the reason slash excuse that they gave was that they wanted to give everybody who was a member of the Columbia Law review an opportunity to read the piece. Facially. That makes sense.

Joe Patrice:

Well, I know. Well, of course not every member of the law review reads every single piece because then the law review grind

Chris Williams:

To a hall. That’s what I’m getting to facially. That makes sense. But if you’re aware of how law review works, it doesn’t because, and that’s why I think that the board gave that reasoning because to a person that’s not aware of the process that just sees this as, oh my God, this bad thing is happening. People that don’t know the insider baseball would be confused about, well, why is this a big deal? But I

Kathryn Rubino:

Mean, on the other hand, fundamentally the audience that they’re talking to is the legal audience. People who, if they themselves were not on journals, are familiar with the process from being a lawyer and having gone to law school, even if you’re not on the journal, you’re still familiar with generally what happens. I that I think it’s an excuse that’s meant to play well in the mainstream media press. It’s good ethics. It’s not anything that passes even the slightest bit of muster for a legal audience.

Chris Williams:

And the thing is that even lawyers, I think most lawyers wouldn’t be aware of the process. Not like most lawyers make law review. And I would assume, and I would assume that people that know the process of publishing what have you would be people that are intimately involved with the process or if not in law review, go out of their way to become aware of it.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I don’t know. I think anybody who goes to law school, you end up with friends who do make it or they’re on some other journal and law review being more important. But the other journals, they function the same.

Chris Williams:

So you think the average law student who is not on Law Review knows intimately about how the board has influence on the process of law review publishing?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, no. No. What I’m saying though is that I think that most, yeah, the student

Joe Patrice:

Editor job

Kathryn Rubino:

I think they’re aware generally of the way the editing process happens in normal times that not everybody, not the crazy times where the website, not everybody reads everything. That would be a wild burden to put on everyone. I think there’s sort of those jokes that appear generally about, oh, I was just sight checking. I think there is general awareness of what the process looks like, at least the big picture process looks like in normal times. And that this excuse is

Joe Patrice:

Not that. And it certainly doesn’t exist where you get, you say, I want everyone to read this one article, but not everyone to read every other article, and therefore we’re not going to publish any articles. Which of course, this argument about editing is such a sham. But more of the big reasons why it’s such a sham is of course, if that was the problem, then they would’ve pulped this one article for a while. But they pulled the whole website and blew up the whole website because the board doesn’t have the power to say, don’t publish this. But they do have the power to just shut off the lights. And that’s what’s happened here. Michael Dorf, professor at Cornell, he has a good piece on his website walking through the process here where he’s like, there’s just no way to read this as anything. But the hope on the part of the board that once everybody read it, someone would say something that would give them plausible deniability to cancel the piece as a whole, and then no one did. Which brings us to, I guess the final point, which is that they’re on strike now. Right.

Chris Williams:

Well, I wanted to make a point before that. Generally the articles that you find in law reviews are kind of boring. I mean, sometimes you do people that want to do fun things, but it’s usually, from what I hear, it’s usually other professors from other places sending in things and people publishing and what have you. There have been a couple cases, one of the responses to this was that the content was so controversial or could be seen as racist or what have you, and that’s why this was a special case. This is not the only case that somebody has published something controversial in a law review. So for example, there’s an academic, his name is Anthony Farley, a lawyer who also has writings on race, and he wrote this thing called accumulation where he’s basically, the rule of law as such is foundation on white supremacy, white superiority over black subjugation. That’s one of the things that would get seen as being part of the critical race theory thing that’s being censored. So here would be a clear censorship issue. Well,

Kathryn Rubino:

Not at every journal for sure, but certainly,

Chris Williams:

Well, not at every journal, but somebody writing something like this that is a fundamental critique is not unprecedented. Oh yeah. Some people were approaching this as if this was a novel thing to put in a law review journal. They’re like, no, there are other things that are out there that are making niche legal arguments about civil society as such.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, that’s an excellent point that the Body of Law Review has lots of articles that make these kinds of arguments.

Chris Williams:

So one of the things that I wanted to address is people are treating as if it’s some novel offense. And I’m like, that misses it entirely. So I just wanted to situate the nature of this censorship in relation to other things that exist out there that said, Columbia Law review, students are boycotting,

Kathryn Rubino:

They’re on strike, right?

Joe Patrice:

They’re on strike. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

I get striking in part because of their board of directors intervening and breaking from norm to interfere in the normal operations.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, the board of direction is usurping the power of the editorial staff, student auditors, which is so they are striking. And I think that that is commiserate kind of response.

Joe Patrice:

This is clearly something that only is coming up based on the school. And Columbia as a university has not dealt well with the last few months as we’ve seen. So this only comes up under this context. Chris’s point is great. If this was any other time in history, a critical race or Orientalism argument in a law review would not be seen written by a human rights lawyer about how to conceive of human rights, would not in any way be considered out of the norm. And so this is a wild attempt to just try to avoid being in conservative crosshairs over this, which is

Chris Williams:

Like the attempts to sensationalize the writing is also a related topic that should be addressed.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Because not particularly, not Reddit it closely, but I’ve read the beginning conclusion and scanned some of the middle. It is not a wildly out of left field kind of argument. Its argument is basically that existing human rights standards and norms do not take, are incapable of taking into account the unique way in which there has been kind of a slow burn ethnic dispossession of the Palestinian people. Which okay, maybe that might be true, that there’s human rights laws don’t stretch that far. And the argument is we should have a standard that would include that what is happening here internationally, which is certainly within the realm of fairly normal conversation about how in the human rights law space, I would think. Anyway, with all that said, I think we’re done, right? Yeah. Cool. Thanks everybody for listening. You should be subscribed to the show so you get new episodes when they come out.

You can leave us reviews stars, write something, it’s always useful. Read Above the Law. Of course you can listen to the ot, which Kathryn’s other podcast. You listen to me on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable if you’d like on Fridays, you could check out the other shows from the Legal Talk Network. You can follow social media. It’s at ATL blog. It’s at Joseph Patrice on X Twitter, and it’s Joe Patrice on blue sky. You also have Kathryn one, the numeral one, and writes for rent rights like handwriting, not like human rights. And with all of that done, we will talk to you later.

Kathryn Rubino:

Peace.

Chris Williams:

Peace.

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