New Law School Rankings And Old Supreme Court Drama

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

It so begins another episode that doesn’t even work when I begin this way.

Kathryn Rubino:

It really is not dependent on what you say. It’s just interrupting you. That’s the fun bit.

Chris Williams:

This conversation has happened at least 13 times.

Joe Patrice:

Right? And it needs to stop. It needs to be

Chris Williams:

Okay. So after the ninth time this happened to you, Joe, you should have realized that it wasn’t

Kathryn Rubino:

Joe’s learning what the Streisand effect is in real time. Don’t make a big deal about it and it’s less funny

Chris Williams:

And that he transitions.

Joe Patrice:

Another episode of Thinking Like. A Lawyer. This is, I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. This is our podcast. I have a couple of co-hosts. Anyway, they’re here.

We’re Going to talk about the stories from the week that was in legal, but first we begin with a little bit of small talk.

Kathryn Rubino:

Small talk. Did anybody do anything fun over the weekend? The weather proved to be pretty decent, at least where I am living and

Joe Patrice:

Oh, but it won’t be soon.

Kathryn Rubino:

I Know that’s stupid. Heat cap. Heat.

Joe Patrice:

Heat. Dome. Dome.

Kathryn Rubino:

Stupid. Stupid. Why is it what it’s going to be?

Chris Williams:

Who’s calling it that?

Joe Patrice:

Everyone. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

That meteorologists must,

Joe Patrice:

I guess the term for the meteorological phenomenon. Yeah.

Chris Williams:

You know what? I think they should stick to predicting forecast and not naming things. That just sounds ominous.

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, I think

Joe Patrice:

It, is it ominous? I think that’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Why. That’s the

Joe Patrice:

Problem.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. No, no. Look, they name dangerous storms that kill people and kinder names than heat dome.

Joe Patrice:

That’s fair. That’s fair. They probably should have meaner names for,

Chris Williams:

Yeah, heat dom sounds a lot more dangerous than Stacey and Stacey can probably wipe out the entire East coast.

Joe Patrice:

A couple years ago, I think it was weather.com tried to, and I don’t know if they’ve had any success with it, but tried to start naming on their own accord, winter storms so that they could keep the whole approaching winter storm Camille or whatever to keep.

Kathryn Rubino:

I don’t think it’s taken off since this is the first I’ve heard of it. Oh

Joe Patrice:

Really?

Well, maybe you just don’t follow weather talk

Kathryn Rubino:

Or whatever. I mean I You are not wrong there, but I think the whole reason why the hurricane naming is a thing is because it is evolved beyond that. Right. Everyone knows Hurricane Andrew what that was, when that was Even Superstorm Sandy. People know it.

Chris Williams:

I think if they called Hurricane Sandy, like Megatron kill Bott, it would’ve been more accurate and more people would’ve lived. I’m just saying.

Joe Patrice:

Well, yeah. So triple digit temperatures in the northeast coming this week not

Kathryn Rubino:

Great. Yeah, because of this dome fit situation, but I took the fact that it was not yet triple digits and had some family barbecue time, which was a good time. Was had by all

Joe Patrice:

Was great.

Chris Williams:

Do you have the green egg?

Joe Patrice:

No, she does not. She doesn’t know what that is, but I know what that is. I was

Kathryn Rubino:

Like, so

Joe Patrice:

I can tell you she

Kathryn Rubino:

Got green eggs and ham. No,

Joe Patrice:

I am familiar with what you mean by the green egg and No, but I actually saw an interesting, isn’t it a smoker? It is a form of smoker. There

Kathryn Rubino:

You go. My cousin has a smoker. Could

Chris Williams:

You be knowledgeable? We

Kathryn Rubino:

Had smoked food. We had pulled pork and smoked macaroni and cheese. That was tasty.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, I didn’t get an invite, but that’s okay. Just find a corner crying. I usually do

Kathryn Rubino:

Fair.

Joe Patrice:

I do not actually have a smoker at all, but I should get into that business.

Kathryn Rubino:

Get on that. Yeah, no, yeah, as I was saying, my cousin had it. We was at their house for the barbecue this weekend and I was very impressed by the smoking of cheese based products. I know chefs can do it, but it impressed me that my cousin did it and it was tasty.

Chris Williams:

Did you smoke any fruit or grill? Any fruit?

Kathryn Rubino:

They did not. There was a fruit course, but it was just sort of cut up fruit with whip cream.

Chris Williams:

That is a fun thing. I see some people do. They’ll be like, oh, this vegan sushi is made with what have you. But

Kathryn Rubino:

I do love a grilled pineapple, particularly if you’re doing a shrimp on the grill, throw on some pineapple to me that it’s like a plus summertime food.

Joe Patrice:

Great.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, did nobody else do anything fun this weekends or are you just praying that the heat dome won’t kill you all mostly?

Chris Williams:

Oh, I slept mostly.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh good.

Chris Williams:

I slept. I did not need to worry about the weather outside with my air conditioning. It was phenomenal. I recommended it to everyone.

Joe Patrice:

Well, because of his air conditioning, the climate now has things called heat dos.

Kathryn Rubino:

That’s right. It was just

Chris Williams:

His air condition. Exxon. Okay.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. But no, it’s brutal. I just tried to get the various area outside, tidied up, but fell behind on it

Kathryn Rubino:

Sounds like a thankless task.

Joe Patrice:

It is very thankless. I have received no thanks, but we don’t do it for that. We do it for the love of the game. Right. And that’s also,

Kathryn Rubino:

I dunno who this we is, but yeah, maybe that’s

Joe Patrice:

The Royal Week, that editorial. Anyway, I think that can conclude our small talking, right? I

Kathryn Rubino:

Mean,

Joe Patrice:

Oh well there it’s anyway,

Kathryn Rubino:

You don’t want to really know things about us, I guess,

Joe Patrice:

Ideally. So with that said, let’s move to the biggest topic of the week for us, especially here at Above. the Law, because we are all very proud of these. We released our law school rankings.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yay. Yes. Less controversial than us.

Joe Patrice:

That is fair. Our rankings. So let’s take a step back. US News of course, has had a lot of controversy with its more historically enshrined ranking system with some law schools pulling out of it over complaints about the methodology. It then changing its methodology around Willy-nilly to try and get at different issues. And a recent study that we reported at Above, the Law that did a longitudinal study and determined that students basically don’t seem to react much to the US news rankings anymore. That said, we endeavor at Above the Law to have a kind of different approach rather than judging schools based on how high the LSAT scores of their incoming class are. We judge them based on what the outcome is, how many of the graduates get jobs, how many of those jobs are paying enough for them to pay off their debt.

Kathryn Rubino:

Being in a torts classroom filled with elite people is great in all, but really what you need is a job when you’re all said and done

Chris Williams:

Right. It’s about that utility being the focus and not prestige is the fringe approach when you’re paying six figures for a piece of paper.

Joe Patrice:

So we have this system that endeavors to be a little bit more outcome based. We obviously don’t say that prospective students should rely solely on that, take everything into account, but we think our rankings have perennially been very valuable to people on that front. This year though, we introduced a new aspect to it that we’re all very, very excited about. And what is that, Kathryn?

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s an interactive feature which allows you to decide how much weight you personally wants on each of the factors that make up the ranking. So depending on what you care about, you can use our slider, put it all the way up at a hundred percent, put it down at 0%, and you can create your own customized ranking. So if a factor doesn’t matter, if you happen to be blessed with extreme wealth, perhaps the debt load is not something that’s particularly relevant to you. So you can jot that down all the way down to 0% and take a look at the resulted rankings.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I want to go into public interest. Okay, you move that up. I’m not sure about public interest versus big law, but I know that I’m comfortable with a legal job either way. So our house ranking system puts a lot of weight on big law to the extent that that’s the way in which you can make enough money to pay off your loans. If that is not the concern, you feel like you can find schools that are good with public interest loan forgiveness, you may jot that up, maybe not even go a hundred percent, but you jot that up another 50% to put it on par. You can do those things in our rankings now and get a new customized for you ranking, which we like.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, which is nice too. Obviously the sort of main house rankings as you termed them, are still available and we do think that they’re valuable and useful, especially if you don’t know. Listen, when you’re thinking about law school, you’re not already enmeshed in the legal industry. So to a certain extent you don’t know what you don’t know yet. So I think that those are all reasons why the house rankings are valuable, but once you sort of become a little bit nuanced and everyone’s different, different, everyone wants a different career when they’re all said and done. And I think that having the data in this very manipulatable way, in individualized way is really useful because not everyone’s going to think the same things.

Chris Williams:

I wonder if there’s a way to finesse the criteria to make as law rank second.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it doesn’t do. They have been doing a lot of work to be pushed up as high as they have been in the US news rankings and they still complain about where they are despite the fact that they’re way higher than they probably should be in US news. So I’m sure there is some way you can play with it, but probably not. I mean, they’ve really targeted the US news rankings and chased those. So they’ve been doing things to take advantage of that algorithm, which one of the points about our house system that we have always been proud of is years ago when we first introduced it, I remember law school transparency wrote a nice review of it saying that this is what a ranking should be. Because if a school wants to gain these rankings, the only way they can do it is by delivering better results for students and charging less, which is the sort of thing you want,

Kathryn Rubino:

Which makes everyone happy

Joe Patrice:

As opposed to US news, which can gain the system by messing with the size of their library or changing around some faculty to student ratios and stuff, which are all

Kathryn Rubino:

Have a minimal impact on the actual quality of your education.

Joe Patrice:

So that’s something that we’ve always done. I did this in writing, but the inspiration for all of this was the Black Guide to Law School from last year got rid of its rankings and adopted a system where they had different rankings for different interests. And so the raw data was available for different interests and I was inspired by that. I raised it with our research team and was like, is there a way we could do something like this? But rather than have individual rankings, we can have ways in which you can manipulate. And they took to that task and have spent the last year working on a way to do that and now we have it. So anybody out there can also,

Chris Williams:

Speaking of black people happy Juneteenth.

Joe Patrice:

Yes, that’s true. That’s when

Chris Williams:

The podcast will

Joe Patrice:

Go live. We will be out. Yeah, so good point. It might not be out that day then for that reason, but it might be up the next day anyway. Point is Black Guide Law School did this inspired us. Our team worked all year to make it a reality. And yeah, we’re very good. So if you are looking at law schools now, or if you know anybody who’s considering law schools, make sure they check out and play with our system and integrate that into their decision making matrix as it were.

Kathryn Rubino:

There you go.

Joe Patrice:

Anything else on our rankings conversation?

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean perhaps we should say congratulations to UVA who did top our

Joe Patrice:

Pop those collars. UVA.

Kathryn Rubino:

There you go.

Joe Patrice:

UVA is the top of our rankings.

Kathryn Rubino:

How do you feel that your law school did not make the top 10,

Joe Patrice:

Did it not? I thought it was.

Kathryn Rubino:

It did not. I thought it was nine. It’s UVA, Chicago, duke, Michigan, Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Notre Dame and Vanderbilt.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, I mean the issue with NYU, and this is a long standing issue with NYU is it costs a lot of money. So does

Kathryn Rubino:

Columbia number five. I will just point out this healthy rivalry that we have about our law schools.

Joe Patrice:

I just want to say fuck

Kathryn Rubino:

Vanderbilt. That’s all.

Joe Patrice:

And this has long been, one of the problems with our rankings is obviously this is a good part of the adjustability is federal clerkships, Supreme Court clerkships, which tend to be much more lagging in their accepting of people outside of the Harvard, Yale, Columbia kind of historical universe. We give a lot of weight to those as a way of being a marker of some of those kind of output related marker of some of those input prestige stuff. But if you aren’t interested in that, you can dial that down. But that is a reason why Columbia always has a bit of an advantage over NYU because

Kathryn Rubino:

I know Harvard and Yale did not make the top 10 either, nor did Stanford. So the top four, it’s interesting. Yale

Joe Patrice:

Has always had problems in our rankings. Oh

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. Because they have a smaller class than most law schools. So more people choosing these sort of individualized careers that don’t necessarily reflect in what we are tracking. These big law jobs tends to hurt them. And a lot of people who get jds from Yale have very prestigious and careers, but not necessarily in the most typical way.

Joe Patrice:

The odds that you’re going to become the dictator of a small nation are very high for Yale

Kathryn Rubino:

Law grants, but

Joe Patrice:

That doesn’t show up in NA’s. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

We can’t track that.

Joe Patrice:

So that does not show up in long-term legal career requiring a JD number. So it it’s just

Kathryn Rubino:

Advantage jd. It’s not required it’s advantage.

Joe Patrice:

So yeah, that’s a fair point with them. All right, folks, the Supreme Court is still in session. What up

Kathryn Rubino:

With that?

Joe Patrice:

They shouldn’t be. We’re past the midway point of June. They still are in session. They still have over 20 cases to go. It is absolutely bonkers that we’re still waiting on decisions and that every time they come out, they only do like three a day and are dragging this out forever,

Kathryn Rubino:

But well, they’re waiting till to make this immunity decision for as long as possible, I think.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So we may not be done until November, but no, they will be done at some point soon Anyway. The Supreme Court is in full swing as it’s getting itself down to the end of the docket. It chose for itself. There were a lot of stories about the Supreme Court last week, so let’s untangle the various things that

Kathryn Rubino:

Happened. Sure. Which one do you want to start with?

Joe Patrice:

Well, let’s start with one that I didn’t think was necessarily the most groundbreaking article issue of the week, but it was the most successful traffic wise, so clearly our audience cares a lot about it. You wrote a story about Amy Coney Barrett’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Remarks. Yeah, so the case was Del versus Elster, and that was the Lanham Act. Trump too small, you can’t cop, you can’t have a trademark for that. And Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion and he’s want to do, he scours the historical record to find specific examples that he thinks means that this has to be the only possible way to interpret these terms. And listen, he’s not the first time he’s done something like that, obviously did it in Bruin, did it in CFPB, Alito did it in Dobbs. This is sort of the far right of the court’s way that they justify changing precedent is saying, well, yes, but if you go back far enough, really the established precedent was what was wrong. And Amy Coney Barrett, despite voting with those folks the entire time, doesn’t like that tendency, thinks that it’s problematic to try to scour the historical record to cherry pick, and she really calls it out in some pretty strong terms saying that it is wrong for multiple reasons and that’s not how you should be thinking about the law. She’s going to write a concurrence, she’s still going to vote. The actual decision will still count her vote, but she will write a concurrence, a sharply worded concurrence that calls folks out for trying to cherry pick historical examples.

Joe Patrice:

So this case, this as Kathryn kind of alluded, let’s explain a little bit more what happens in this case. So this is a Landam Act case. This is about trademarks. A person was making T-shirts parodying Donald Trump, Trump

Kathryn Rubino:

Too

Joe Patrice:

Small and applied because they were making real business of these satirical shirts. They wanted to have a trademark for that. The argument was, well, you can’t trademark somebody else’s some other living person’s name, which is a rule that we have for a lot of very good reasons because it would be awful if you could just trademark some other famous person and make money off of that. That said, the counterargument is given that this person is a president. Parodying a president actually seems like something that we should be protecting on First Amendment grounds. And so there was a disagreement in the lower courts of maybe we should allow people to do this. The court here discerns know what really Trumps pun intended is the idea of doing a living person’s name. The argument between a c, b and Thomas here is you don’t need to get into any of this historical stuff to just say, look, the Lanam Act pretty clearly says you can’t be the history of surrounding it, but the precedents surrounding it are you can’t trademark other people’s names. That’s really all you need to do to get an opinion. That concludes this way, this compulsion to go back and try to find some pamphleteer from the 1670s who said something vaguely about trademarks is ridiculous, and that’s her take

Kathryn Rubino:

And says there are two problems with it that she identifies. The first is that the historical examples that Thomas is able to cobble together aren’t actually on point. It’s just using history for the sake of using history without it actually changing the analysis that you should be doing. And it’s not particularly helpful in this case. She says additionally, she says that there’s no reason why you have to find these historical analogs in order to do our jobs,

Joe Patrice:

And that’s the big thing,

Kathryn Rubino:

But she breaks it down that way. But it’s particularly galling that they spend all this time trying to find these historical examples and she’s like, that doesn’t even matter. That’s not even the actual analog here.

Chris Williams:

Wasn’t there a point where she said that in the event of novel events, there would be need for us to create novel solutions? I like that part and I felt like it was honest. I feel like I’m just going

Kathryn Rubino:

To make it up if this is what I want to do to be clear.

Chris Williams:

And it’s nice to see a justice say that even, I mean, I feel like it was alluded to rather than I’ll just make some shit up. But I would much rather prefer that transparency than the Oh, well, what would Thomas Jefferson think about transporters? Well, horses,

Joe Patrice:

So in a segue from that, also, we got other opinions last week. One that also danced around original meanings, but not in a constitutional way. We had the bump stock ban case, which was after the Las Vegas massacre. There was with a ton of bipartisan support, even for the Trump administration to ban these, which they did. There’s a longstanding statute that says you can’t have machine guns and the A TF can regulate to prevent machine guns from good day out there. A bump stock is a interesting machine. One would argue in the purely physics term, it’s a device that you can attach to a gun that utilizes physics and springs and so on to allow you to only pull the trigger once on a semi-automatic weapon, and yet it have it fire automatically because of the force of the recoil. The argument is, does this count as a machine gun?

Yes. Well, the majority in this opinion also going with a original meaning textualist nonsense battle. They choose to not care about what the original meaning of it was this time or any of the historical precedents surrounding it this time, and instead went with a purely textual. It says single function of a trigger, and that means since the trigger itself is moving each time, even if it’s not by design of the shooter, that means it is not a fully automatic machine gun. The dissent took a different take, which is that in fact, the whole legislative history surrounding this would suggest that any kind of mechanical means that allows the gun to fire on one single pole of a trigger would count and by pull of a trigger. There was even Supreme Court precedents from the past that parsed this and said, no, of course we don’t mean the physical movement of a piece of metal. We mean the shooter making the decision to pull the trigger once, and that means this would be a machine gun that dispute played out between the two of them. It is not a Second Amendment case by any means. It is purely a statutory interpretation case. But it’s interesting as a segue because here’s one where original public meaning and original public understanding, the hallmarks of this originalist theory that Thomas believes in are jettison completely in favor of Ty Durp. We have a dictionary and Webster’s defines function as blank

Kathryn Rubino:

And more accurately or more to the point is it is jettisoned in order to advance the preferred policy goal. Right? Sure. This is very much a craven exercise by the majority, and I thought one of the more powerful pieces of the dissent was when Sotomayor went through each of the members of the majority and said, this is what you said here. This is what you said here and went through and said, none. You’re literally changing your own personal jurisprudence in order to allow more people to be killed. Fe

Joe Patrice:

Alito wrote a concurrence in this case, a short one in which he basically said, I completely recognize that the original statute was intended to cover this. Obviously it was obviously everybody understands it, but I’m not doing it. Anyway. He then concludes with, if congress needs to do something about this, they can happily do something, which obviously they are not because that’s not how these congresses work. But his point is not completely wrong that if Congress immediately in the aftermath of that massacre, obviously given that the Trump administration pushed this bill, this was one of those rare instances where the Republicans were largely lined up on the side of, okay, everybody, we need to regulate guns, which is rare Alitos position is they could have passed a law then, but they didn’t. They relied on this law from decades and decades ago, and for that reason we’re striking it down.

There’s some people who are like, well, see, he, he’s really just pointing out that they could do some extra legislation, but the real problem that nobody gets at here is why would they have, the reason they didn’t pass a new bill then is they looked at the statute and said, well, obviously it’s covered. You don’t make new bills when you think you’ve already made the bill. The yanking from underneath of Congress, the assurances that they’ve already acted is the real problem. And this is why I find the counterargument of, well, if Congress wants to change this, they can to be so problematic is there are some instances where areas of law have never been legislated and whatever. This isn’t one of those. This is a situation where everyone read this statute as covering this up until last week, and that’s the disingenuousness of the conversation. I think that needs to be flagged and we need to have some sort of flagged, oh, because it’s Alito. Yeah. That needs to be, we need to parse between those two different situations, I think a little bit better as a society.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think that sort of rhetorically something else that your article pointed out was the majority opinion that was written by Thomas’s sort of weird kudos to the shooter in the Las Vegas. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Good. Great point. Just as a random aside, Clarence Thomas in the middle of the opinion just kind of takes a little bit of a side note, go mass shooters. I mean, you got to hand it to ’em, which was a little weird. Something that you would think someone in the editing process might’ve said, maybe we don’t need this paragraph.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think it’s interesting because obviously I’ve read it at this point, and I think perhaps they were a little forest for the trees E because I think that when you’re in the middle of it, it seems like, well, I’m just kind of making, answering back a potential argument that this is not skilled and whatever. And it wasn’t until you kind of said this was an actual person and 600 plus people were injured in minutes because of this bump stock that it really kind of becomes super chilling when you’re able to look at that graph, that paragraph, and look at what the actual real life implications of it.

Joe Patrice:

So to the extent he had an argument, the argument is you can theoretically without a bump stock, get bump stock results, but it’s very difficult and it requires a lot of skill to do that. With the spring loaded kind of bump stock situation, you can, for lack of a better explanation of the technicalities of it, you can do that. You can make that super easy. And his point is you could theoretically, if you really knew how to do it, you could kind of simulate this without the extra piece of machinery. I believe the reason he goes into this weird thing is that several pages later, he tries to argue that if we were to say that this device converts this into a machine gun, technically since people could theoretically do it without this device, it would make even the semi-automatic without this of machine gun worth regulating.

Put aside that the answer to that in my mind should be, yep, so we should, but his position, he’s taking for granted the idea that obviously you can’t regulate that, which is a stretch, but the problem with it, even if you’re charitably giving him this interpretation and that that’s why he did it, it still is him saying you’ve got to hand it to mass shooters for their ability to really pull off some nice little balancing and aiming, because it’s hard to hit a lot of children really fast is kind of his point, which not exactly. Well, I mean it really is a true colors moment, but is something that even though it’s probably a Freudian slip level of honesty is something that I would’ve thought would’ve gotten stopped in the editing process.

Chris Williams:

I wish he worked as hard to be a humane jurist as you did to piece together possible worlds where his argument was coherent.

Joe Patrice:

Okay,

Kathryn Rubino:

So we’re going to continue recording this podcast.

Joe Patrice:

Oh, I see what you did there. So two other Supreme Court stories of the week that were big because why isn’t everything the Supreme Court unfortunately? Well,

Kathryn Rubino:

They are very much dictating our lives in

Joe Patrice:

Problematic ways. Sure, sure. So speaking of secret recordings,

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, we know we’re being recorded, but not everybody knows they’re being recorded. There was a bunch of recordings that were released that came from the Supreme Court historical Society’s annual dinner documentarian. Laura Windsor bought a ticket, became a member, bought a ticket, and spoke with various members of the court, elite Justice Alito and Justice Roberts, as well as Alitos wife, and recorded those conversations and the recordings have revealed some very interesting stuff. In her conversation with Alito, he said that he agreed that the country needs to become more godly and has to return to godliness, and he also talked about,

Joe Patrice:

Also talked about how they need to crush everybody and just win. Meanwhile, Martha Ann, who our flags flying, Bren decided to go off on some really insane stuff talking about how she’s German and will crush people.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. It took a little turn for the Nazi at a certain point talking about how she really hated having to see pride flags this month and how so she envisioned in her mind a shame flag that she would like to design and fly in response. Yeah, they’re definitely going to overturn Lawrence v Texas.

Chris Williams:

You think these people would practice discernment, at least the movie villains know to say, hell Hydra before you start going into your rants. Do they not watch the

Joe Patrice:

Films? Yeah, so actually that’s a great point. So there’ve been some criticisms of this to the extent that even though she bought a ticket and was there legally and everything, she didn’t identify herself as a journalist, whatever, while she was doing these recordings. There’s some people who are like, this is kind of ambush journalism that should be frowned upon. Obviously people like Project Veritas used to do this and try to deceptively edit things, which is not an allegation here, but those other organizations would do that and it was bad. I hear all that. I actually generally agree with all that. I don’t think that it’s good to do that kind of ambush journalism that said,

Chris Williams:

It was like, hello, how are you? Great. You know who I hate my neighbors,

Joe Patrice:

And that was the part that I was going to say I was going to say. But what Chris had saw is even if you, and think of it as kind of like a hearsay game, I don’t admit the evidence for the substance of what they’re saying because I think it’s bad to try to do it that way, but I am going to let the evidence in for the, oh my God, they just met this person and felt fully comfortable going off on, yeah, we’re kind of crazy. And that says something about temperament that I think is more important necessarily than the substance. Honestly,

Chris Williams:

I think it says something about policing culture. I know that if I go somewhere and I say something, I act as if it’s being recorded or this having an assumption that this might get back to me. I think that her freedom and just saying this wild stuff, what’s not a care in the world shows how unaffected they are by the consequences of their thoughts and action.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I mean, it is interesting. This is very much a professional endeavor for the Supreme Court Justices and his wife is there as part of that. And think about it, if a big law partner was at some cocktail party and started saying wild shit, even if it wasn’t recorded, but we had multiple eyewitness accounts, that’s something I think is very much fair to write about. I think that the ability, the willingness to say this in an absolute public place is what if it wasn’t recorded, but five people heard it and that’s how it became the story. What is the difference just that now we have the technology that proves that it’s true.

Chris Williams:

Also, just to verify the timeline, this is also happened after she already knew her husband was in trouble, right? Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

June 3rd was the date of

Joe Patrice:

All the flag stuff

Chris Williams:

Happening. So isn’t even like this is the first time this has happened. This is, what’s the name, a recidivist?

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, that’s why they got in the deep flag conversation for sure.

Joe Patrice:

Well, the policing point that Chris makes transitions to another issue, which is Alito made a point over this last week or so about how journalism’s bad ProPublica shouldn’t be.

Kathryn Rubino:

That was part of these recorded conversations,

Joe Patrice:

And that I think speaks to Chris’s point about policing. He does think that he shouldn’t be recorded or answerable for anything he says when he goes out and does it, and when people do that sort of thing. He thinks that that is a problem, a breach of the way in which the government should work, that as a judge, he should be able to do whatever and no one should have any inquiry of him or hold him accountable in any way, which is disturbing. Yeah,

Chris Williams:

Strange. It’s the customs of authority. It’s like I’m not supposed to be answerable like you little people are.

Joe Patrice:

Right? So with that, we are way over time. I will just throw in speaking of people not being ProPublica, people not being answerable and ProPublic, so on Clarence Thomas has released, as we covered last week, released all of these previously undisclosed trips and gifts up in the millions, did all that. Harlan Crow, one of his large benefactors who has been subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee, finally reached a settlement with them by which they would drop their agreement. We in exchange for some documents, so immediately after Clarence Thomas says, alright, fine, you got me. Here’s all of the gifts that I’ve received. Harlan Crowe turns over some documents and the Senate goes, wait a minute, you didn’t disclose all of these other trips. So even after Clarence Thomas admits to tons of seemingly problematic stuff, he is caught lying yet again. I don’t know. So there’s anything more to say about that than it’s already

Chris Williams:

Been said. Thomas, Thomas texted him in the group chat. I was like, bruh,

Joe Patrice:

I mean, even if you think Harlan’s never going to hand over those documents, if you’re finally giving in and saying, I’m going to release and disclose all these things that are previously undisclosed, wouldn’t you just ask Harlan for his receipts to make sure you got all of them? Because the worst thing you can do is say, here’s everything and it not be everything. But

Kathryn Rubino:

Here’s the thing, why would he do that? Why would he talk about trips that the public doesn’t know about? We can’t do anything about the fact that it is a terrible look for him. He still gets his job. He still, there’s no realistic way that there’s ever going to be any consequences for that decision. So Yolo is kind of his thought. I think

Joe Patrice:

It’s not like accountability will make him Pete Crow. Oh,

Well done. Well done. We’ve had some good ones. We have that. We had the flag thing, we had trumping. Yeah, no, our pun game is strong today. And with that, thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show to get new episodes when they come out. You should give reviews and stars. Those are all great things so that more people find the show. You should be listening to this show. Also the ot, which Kathryn hosts. You can listen to Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable, which I’m a panelist on actually hosted last week. But normally just a panelist on, you can check out other shows from the Legal Talk Network. You could be reading Above the Law every week. So you read these and more stories as they happen. Follow us on social media at ATL blog at Joseph Patrice, at Kathryn one at Writes for Rent. I’m also Joe Patrice at Blue Sky. Everybody else, I think kept their same name. And with all of that, we are now done and we’ll check in with you next week. Ace.

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