In 2024 The GOP Is A Big Fan Of Teen Pregnancy

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kathryn Rubino:

Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Thinking Like. A Lawyer. My name is Kathryn Rubino. I’m a senior editor at Above, the Law, and today I’m joined by my colleague, Chris Williams. Hey, Chris.

Chris Williams:

Hello. Hello.

Kathryn Rubino:

How you doing?

Chris Williams:

Pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

We are missing today our resident sound effect guru and co-host Joe Patrice. He makes his way to yet another legal technology conference, regular listeners. I’m sure we’ll be just waiting with bated breath for his update next week about the latest legal tech conference, because he’s been to, I think, 75 this fall. We will have to wait, and until then, we’ll start with our opening segment, as always, a small talk. How was your weekend?

Chris Williams:

It was pretty good. I played a lot of this game. It’s called a God of War Ragnarok, and it’s interesting. It is the first game I’ve played where I cried because of the narrative. It is very, very well done. I won’t give any spoilers, but if anyone out there played a God of War four or God of four, for anyone that’s familiar, the one that came out in 2018, get God of War five played on your computer. It’s really good. It is really good. A trace is still annoying, but it’s worth it.

Kathryn Rubino:

I will have to take your word for that one. I am not, there’s too many buttons involved in playing video games. Just it’s not for me. I mean, that’s not entirely true though, right? Because there’s all these sets about how women play a ton of video games. They just don’t think of them as video games because they play Candy Crush and other sort of puzzle games. That

Chris Williams:

Animal crossing is

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah

Chris Williams:

It counts. It counts. In the same way that Kavanaugh’s recent book is readable,

Kathryn Rubino:

Gorsuch,

Chris Williams:

Gorsuch, any one of them, but no, yeah, that is a book in the way that animal crossing is a game.

Kathryn Rubino:

It counts. That’s what happens when you try to make our small talk segment about the law. So you get punished by karma. You’re welcome. Taylor Swift sends her best. My weekends, my last couple of weeks have been a little different. So I live in the Hudson Valley and for about two and a half weeks every year. It is perfect. The weather is crisp. It is not cold where you need a jacket, but you can wear one. You maybe get a little warm in the sun. The trees are brilliant shades of yellow and orange and red and green altogether at the same time. The pumpkins are pumpkin ing. You can get an apple cider donut at every gas station, roadside stand, anywhere you pass. You’re never more than three and a half minutes away from an apple cider donut, which it’s good news for all.

And we are in the middle of that right now, and I have a one and a half year old daughter. So I’m trying so hard to make the pictures and the memories right now. So I feel very stressed out in the sense that we went to a pumpkin patch on Saturday and she was wildly uninterested, not uninterested. That would’ve been fine. She was angry at the notion that she was forced to deal with. It was so crowded. I mean, it was so many, many people, but that’s my own fault for going on a Saturday afternoon in October. I probably should have just taken a morning off. I should take a random Wednesday afternoon off and be like, I’m going to a pumpkin patch, you guys. But I went on a Saturday. She just cried the entire time. I went with another family, and I felt bad because I was like, I got to go after. It took us longer to get to the pumpkin patch than the amount of time we spent in the pumpkin patch. Fortunately, the entry fee was $3 and children under two are free. So it cost me $3 to realize that my child was having exactly none of it. I got some pretty hilarious pictures of her crying because those are all so cute

Chris Williams:

And blackmail. You got to love it. If you don’t clean your room. They will see this on whatever equivalent of TikTok is out there.

Kathryn Rubino:

Mean chances are those are already going to be out there, so whatever. Maybe I shouldn’t save it for that purpose, but then I try again on Sunday morning, which wasn’t like a pumpkin patch, pumpkin patch, but there’s a little farm. It was really close to my house, so I didn’t have to spend a ton of time driving there.

Chris Williams:

What is a non pumpkin patch? Pumpkin patch, A squash patch.

Kathryn Rubino:

So they may or may not grow pumpkins there. It’s unclear to me, but they certainly have a giant pile of them that you can take pictures in front of. They have a kind of cute little setup.

Chris Williams:

So you own a farm?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, yes. As I said, it was a little farm. It’s really close to me. They have a little cafe and really, really delicious food, and they have a gift shop. So I’ve been there a bunch just for they have you. You know what it is? They have iced coffee and one of those places that they freeze the ice cubes made out of coffee. So when you get it, you’ve got like, listen, if you are into your ice coffee, you know that this is like God level stuff. So I’ve gone there a bunch.

Chris Williams:

This is a five star Yelp review at the moment,

Kathryn Rubino:

Jones Farm in upstate New York. I would highly recommend for that. And they have really good pies and other baked goods. Anyway, so I’ve been there a bunch for just kind of eating and shopping purposes. But they apparently, again, I don’t know, maybe they do grow the pumpkins onsite. It’s unclear to me. There’s a couple of animals, not a ton it, it’s small, it’s local, but you had a much better time there. So that was good. But it was like she was running down these hills with these beautiful amber trees behind her. That’s all I want. I want 10 more pictures like that and call it good.

Chris Williams:

I feel like that was a phenomenal advertisement for the farm, but at this point, we should probably talk about legal stuff.

Kathryn Rubino:

Interesting. Interesting. Fair enough. We will end our small talk segments without the fanfare that we normally have, but it’ll still end. Never the less. Okay. So we try occasionally here to have segues that make sense. So we were kind of talking about children and the children are our future. So let’s talk about the GOP going all in on teen pregnancy. Good.

Chris Williams:

Oh god.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Honestly, if you had told, listen, I was alive in the nineties, and if you had told me that the GOP, that GOP would one day in your lifetime come out and say that they miss teen pregnancy and that they wanted it back, I would’ve been hard pressed to believe that that is true.

Chris Williams:

It’s one thing for the liberals to finally remember the bush presidency, but for the GOP to be like, nah, we need these kids getting more pregnant. It is a weird,

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. This is the world we live in. This is actually kind of a follow on suit to one that was dealt with during the last term when conservative lawyers and state ags got together and formed a corporation in Amarillo, Texas in order to bring a case in front of Judge Matthew Kame challenging the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug. You guys, I don’t know. It’s rough. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s the abortion pill. It’s fine. So that happened. That happens during the last couple of years and the got thrown out because of a lack of standing, which they now think that they have solved with their latest filing, which says that the state has a compelling interest in getting teen girls pregnant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s apparently 199 page amended complaint saying that the decrease in teen pregnancy as a result of people having access to healthcare, a access to the abortion pill. Wait, wait.

Chris Williams:

This is in Texas, right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes, yes. But okay, so

Chris Williams:

They just moved there.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh my God. That is where the case is filed.

Chris Williams:

Look what Champagne Papi brought upon us all.

Kathryn Rubino:

But again, this is filed by state ags. They have all signed onto it. So that includes the state AG for Missouri, Idaho, Kansas. So not just Texas GOP members that are involved in this. This is much bigger than that. This is kind of a nationwide things, and they said that the decrease in births that teenagers aged 15 to 19, the decrease that is a result they say of the abortion drug has hurt states that they, because girls or people are less likely to give birth when they’re 15 to 19, when they have access to the abortion pill, they say that that hurts those states.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. We’re just one step closer to the state mandated girlfriend meme. This is what happened to them being the party of leaving, not policing your body, leaving you alone. Now you have a state obligation to breed and the drug, it’s in the way of that.

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, the whole libertarian tint was just some shiny wrapping paper that they put on a whole bunch of conservative ideals that have nothing to do with actual liberty. No, but this is completely dystopian, and the reasons why they say that they have a state interest in teen pregnancies is because they might lose a house seat if populations dip so much because people are making choices about their own bodies. That is the most cynical, cynical, cynical thing that I have read in a really long time. They also go on to say that a decrease in population means that they will not have access to the same federal funding, that their federal funding will be less because their population is less. Which really gets me, because you don’t need that money if you have fewer people. But I mean, what a cynical way to be like, well, we weren’t going to spend it on the new people that are in our state. We were just going to take the money and use it for whatever else we had in our minds.

Chris Williams:

I’m just thinking about the implications of this. Do states have an interest in defunding education programs because that is more likely to increase the population, a clear correlation between sex ed and later rates of teen pregnancy. Wheres does this stop? Does the state have an interest in propagating low income rates? This is ridiculous.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, yeah. No, this is a kind of plot to where if this came up in some dystopian novel, you would be like, but surely they’re not making this kind of an argument. Everyone would immediately see through it, wouldn’t they?

Chris Williams:

Yeah. And it’s a shame because there’s a point where you’re like, oh, not everything needs to be brought back to literary analysis. We get it. You have an English degree, but we’re at the point where saying, oh, we’re living in the Handmaiden’s tale is just not doing enough.

Kathryn Rubino:

Come on, Margaret. I would get on it. I need a better analogy here. I need something worse.

Chris Williams:

We need handmade too, electric boogaloo to explain what’s going on, and it’s just the dresses are red.

Kathryn Rubino:

I believe it’s a series right, though? Isn’t the Handmaiden’s Tale a series? Am I wrong about that?

Chris Williams:

I would defer to you here. That was not in my summer reading list ever.

Kathryn Rubino:

Listen, I’ve read certainly my fair share of dystopian future books, but this one, it’s, it’s too sad. It’s too sad. But maybe it is just a single book. I can’t tell. No, it’s just a novel. I was wrong. Maybe it’s just the TV show season six, we are on of that.

Chris Williams:

Well, no, I think the sequel is just coming out in our newspapers, so that’s the confusion.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, fair, fair. But yeah, I mean, listen, who knows, hopefully this will not be a successful argument, even though it’s in the Fifth Circuit. So one at least hopes that by the time it gets to the Supreme Court shall if it gets that far, that it will end there. But we don’t say we live in the worst, the dumbest timeline for no reason. So let’s just cross our fingers and hope like hell.

Chris Williams:

I just can’t wait for Thomas to write the decision and be like, yeah, this clearly falls under the police power. Just so BS justification.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean, listen, the last time it was this case in the earlier version was in front of the Supreme Court. There were definitely conservative justices who were writing. Certainly there is a compelling state interest, but I don’t think that this is what they anticipated the argument would become. I think that they were hopefully advocating for much more reasonable, although still not particularly reasonable. But we’ll see

Chris Williams:

Now that that break is over, we can shift to some uplifting good news

Kathryn Rubino:

Money? No, certainly a set of news. There was some reporting from the American lawyer talking about the paydays of big law partners. Now listen, we write about the paydays of big law partners all the damn time. It’s kind of our bread and butter. But usually we talk about the higher end on the scale, the $20 million paydays partnerships, different law firms rewriting their partnership agreements such that they have the flexibility in order to offer these eye-popping multimillion dollar deals to lateral attorneys that will in their mind bring a large book of business with them as well. But apparently there’s also the downside as well, which is that you can actually get your compensation cut, even if you’re an equity partner at a big law firm. So because you got that brass ring that you’ve worked your entire life for, doesn’t mean the worries about your money are over. The estimates from some experts vary. And again, there’s a fair amount of darkness when you’re talking about the actual money that specific partners are making. We’re kind of talking in generalities and individual examples, but we’re talking anywhere between 10 and 30% of equity partnerships get their amount of money devalued.

Chris Williams:

Yes. That’s rough. Well, and that’s better than my first reading of it actually. I thought it was saying that the partners are losing 10 to 30% of their income, which it’s better than losing a third of what you’re getting paid a year, but still for 10 to 30% of the people would be affected to still

Kathryn Rubino:

Unexpected,

Chris Williams:

Right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. Mean, and maybe that actually hurts worse, right? Because the firm is posting record profits and kind of touting their strong financial performance and you’re taking a cut, which can’t feel great one imagines, but I think it’s becoming increasingly popular, but certainly not as popular as it was during economic downtimes, right? In 2009. I think we saw this a lot more frequently, but it is definitely back, and I think that sort of this is corollary to the hotness of the lateral market. If you want to be able to make these deals, to get these big name lateral partners, the money has to come from somewhere.

Although some of the experts are saying it’s not as bad as all that because when you bring more people to the firm and this overall, the overall compensation and the overall profitability of the firm goes up, that the points that you get are worth more. So even though you might be getting haircut in terms of the number of points you have in the firm, that they might actually be valued more. So it’s not quite as bad as you might have my fear, but still, I dunno. It just seems super depressing to me that you do all the things. You get all the things, and you are a big law equity partner. That’s it. You get an A plus on your career and you still have sort of all these money woes that you’re dealing with.

Chris Williams:

I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. The partner partner, and then there’s the partner fancy associate thing going on. So this is dealing with equity partners, so it’s like, yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

So income partners or non income or non-equity partners generally are given a salary as opposed to points or shares in the profitability overall of the firm or in particular clients or sometimes it’s a combination, but the bulk of their compensation comes on a kind of statics maybe year to year, but on a set compensation model of a salary as opposed to points or equity sharing in the wellbeing of the firm, which is what equity partners do.

Chris Williams:

So is it like the shares that equity partners have, is it moving down because new partners are coming in and the shares that the new partners need have to come from elsewhere? That’s what’s happening. Okay.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, not necessarily, and again, very much varies I think from firm to firm, but I think that there’s, and I think it really is about how much they get valued in the sense that you are having a down year or down series of years, or your practice group is in decline and doesn’t show any particular reason to think that it’s about to turn around and they don’t want to sort of be overpaying partners while might be reasonably profitable, maybe is not as profitable as the rest of the firm.

Chris Williams:

Sure.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay. Our last story is also a Texas story as the first one was, but it sort of has to do with the ongoing romantic saga between now former Judge David Jones and now former Jackson Walker partner Elizabeth Freeman. I think it was over a year ago now that this scandal first broke. And it turns out that the bankruptcy Judge Jones and the bankruptcy partner, Elizabeth Freeman, were in a relationship for many years and never disclosed that fact. The powers that be at Jackson Walker, Elizabeth Freeman’s former firm, actually say that she lied to them about whether or not she was in a relationship with Judge Jones. But despite the fact, listen, you love who you want to love, that’s not an anti love story, but you do have to disclose it. If you continue this way, you’re not continuing to hear cases that your romantic partner is either involved with or perhaps giving advice on, or her ferb is involved with. Yeah. It’s more about legal ethics than it is about romance. Bad. And listen, I can almost promise you that this is not the last story that I am going to write about this particular romantic relationship slash scandal that has been birthed as a result.

Chris Williams:

Judges just generally have a bad time of disclosing.

Kathryn Rubino:

You would think that the whole mere appearance of impropriety would be taken a little bit more to heart by the judiciary, but we are finding increasingly that that is not accurate.

Chris Williams:

Yes. The move now is how would they know? They’ll never

Kathryn Rubino:

Know who’s going to tell them. Yeah. But so as I said, judge Jones at the time, judge Jones continued to hear cases involving Jackson Walker as a result of once this scandal broke the Justice Department’s bankruptcy monitor, the US trustee filed a lawsuit seeking to claw back over 18 million in fees that they paid to Jackson Walker in the cases that Jones presided over. So that’s kind of the thing that is hanging over all the developments in this case. But Bloomberg Law was able to see some of the messages, the text messages between Freeman and her colleagues that show what was happening, or at least not necessarily party conversations, but certainly some conversations that were going on behind the scenes. Right before Jackson Walker represented JC Penney in their bankruptcy Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, and before they filed that particular bankruptcy, Freeman texted a colleague, talked to Jones, he’s got us, and after that there was a sort of series of maneuvers that the firm participated in order to make sure that the JC Penney case, it was in front of Judge Jones.

Chris Williams:

I always feel like I’m in a weird position where I just expect better of shady stuff just being Morse code something. At least let it be more than the obvious, Hey, we shouldn’t be doing this wink, wink,

Kathryn Rubino:

Communicate

Chris Williams:

As if these things are going to end up in a lawsuit. At some point, they probably will.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. One of the other texts that they report on that Freeman said to her colleague, we are keeping this down low with lots of O’s and W’s, but which

Chris Williams:

Is not a low way to communicate the sentiment. I’m just waiting for a judge to be on a hot mic. Let’s keep it hush. Just close up.

Kathryn Rubino:

So yeah, they filed the case in a particular jurisdiction where there’s only two judge options. The aforementioned Judge Jones and Judge Iger, who the text messages reveal are thought of as a process hawk, I think it was. And they wanted to know that Jones will cut through the bullshit. So it’s not so much that they want to dodge Isker, but they do.

Chris Williams:

And by Process Hawk, is that a pejorative for saying make sure things are done correctly?

Kathryn Rubino:

Who knows? Who knows. I will also note that cases that are immediately designated complex by the filer are generally given to Isker, and the JCPenney case was not noted as complex before or during the initial filing period. It was later diagnosed, it was later designated complex, but that was by Jones and Jones kept the case as a result. So yeah, that’s what happened there. And this is just, there are 33 cases where the US Tri is disputing the fees that they paid to Jackson Walker. They paid about $1 million in fees to Jackson Walker for this case, and almost $286,000 of that 1 million fee were from Freeman’s hours and the time that she built to the matter. So I think we are starting to understand why this is a case and why all this is going on, and it feels like this won’t be the end of the story.

Chris Williams:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

As I said, I will be very surprised if this is the last time I have to talk about the fallout from the Jones Freeman Love affair.

Chris Williams:

Again, love who you love, but don’t bang your gavel in front of him.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah.

Chris Williams:

And if you need that as a tattoo inspo, take it. I don’t even need credit, but just take it to heart.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. Mere appearance of impropriety is real and it’d be super, just super if more people took that

Chris Williams:

Seriously.

Kathryn Rubino:

I think that pretty much wraps us up for the week. Thank you to all of our listeners, and you should be reading us on Above the Law to get these and other stories about the legal industry. You can follow us on social media. I’m at kathryn one. Chris is at Writes for Rent. You should be listening to the other shows on the Legal Talk Network. I’m also the host of the Jabot, which is a different podcast. Yeah. Read us, follow us, listen to us, get us.

Chris Williams:

Send in tips.

Kathryn Rubino:

Send in tips. You can always send tips to Above, the Law. You can just send in right off to tips at Above the Law dot com. All information is kept strictly anonymous, so you don’t have to worry on that front. That’s it. Have a good week y’all.

Chris Williams:

Peace.

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