How to Lose Your Job by Supporting Palestine [TEASER]

That is a lucid, intelligent, well-thought-out objection.

Thank you, Your Honor.

Overruled.

Hey, everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking to Rina Workman and Janan Chihadi.

Rina is a third-year law student at NYU Law, and Janan is a recent graduate of Georgetown Law.

Both thought they had their first law jobs all lined up.

But when their messages of support for the cause of Palestinian liberation made them targets on social media, their firms dropped them.

This is a conversation about what speech is really free and what corporate law firms are actually looking for when they say they want diverse teams.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and big law suck.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have rescinded our civil rights like a law firm rescinding a Palestinian activist job offer.

Wow.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hey.

And Michael.

Hi, everybody.

Keeping it topical today.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Special episode.

Yeah.

We are conducting an interview with a couple of folks, Reena Workman and Janann Shahadi.

who had a somewhat similar experience, both of them going into big law jobs and having those offers, those jobs taken taken away from them for what they said.

You know, we thought it would be sort of interesting to talk to them about their experience,

maybe talk about what, like, I don't know, big law diversity efforts actually mean, given stuff like this, right?

Yeah, it's such a crazy time right now with the debate on free speech, whether it's on campus, in the workplace, you know, on social media.

What we are seeing is really unprecedented repression of pro-Palestine expression, right?

Expression of Palestinian solidarity.

And these two, Rina and Jananne, have, you know, suffered some of the most serious consequences.

Jananne, the day before she was supposed to start work at a big law firm, Foley and Gardner, she was fired.

Rina is a third-year law student.

Rina worked at the big law firm Winston and Strawn both of their summers for law school.

Winston and Strahan extended them an offer for working after law school.

And within a few hours of Rena sending out an email in their capacity as SBA president at NYU Law, within a few hours, Winston and Strahan had rescinded that offer.

Now, before we get going, I do think it'd be useful to tell you folks what they actually got into trouble for, ostensibly, because we do touch on some of this in the conversation, but not right up front.

So I think it will help color everyone's understanding of it.

So Rina was the Student Bar Association president at NYU Law, sent out an email, part of which said, and this is shortly after the 10-7 attacks, that Israel bears full responsibility for the violence.

They point out that they were referring to violence generally, like the violence in the region, not something specific to the attacks.

But I think that's how it was interpreted.

And I think that's really the heart of what was objected to by their future employer.

Janan had, like, I think a more complicated situation.

Rhea, I'll let you explain that.

Yeah, Rina's firm came down on them for the email that they sent out.

And then Janan's firm interrogated and then fired her based on like a patchwork, really, of actions and expressions that Janan had done that the firm apparently found objectionable.

So, first, the firm interrogated her about participation in local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.

They also brought up public comments that Janan had had made at a Chicago City Council meeting in October, in which she spoke out against a proposed resolution that only condemned Hamas without making mention of Palestinians at all or decades of occupation.

And then the firm also interrogated Janan based on her background, like literally about her being Palestinian, about her being Muslim, and about her family being immigrants.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think we wanted to speak with these folks for a couple couple of reasons.

One, I think it's just sort of a continuation of a discussion we've had over the course of a few episodes about free speech and what it means and for whom free speech principles tend to apply in this country.

The other is I think there's something to be said here about

the ideals ostensibly espoused by

big law firms in particular, by the legal establishment more broadly.

You know, a while back

did a episode about Nestle v.

Doe, right, where the legal question was related to the use by Nestle of child slaves in the Ivory Coast.

And a lot of lawyers kind of jumped to the defense of Neil Katyall, who argued that case for Nestle, basically saying, look, like we're all lawyers, right?

We're, we're just sort of like neutral arbiters of the law.

We just make arguments on our clients' behalf.

That doesn't mean I support child slavery or murder or whatever.

These institutions have always argued that they don't really have an ideology, right?

We're just, we're just lawyers.

Yes.

But

I think situations like this reveal that they do have an ideology.

And if you apply pressure to these institutions, they will reveal their ideology.

They will fight in defense of their ideology.

They will squash dissent from their ideology, that they have beliefs and they fight for a reactionary agenda.

Yeah, and both Rina's situation and Janann's situation, what was pulled out of their statements, what was found objectionable and decontextualized really shows the bad faith response, the racist response that, you know, these corporations are taking to these kinds of expressions of solidarity.

Yeah.

And just to be clear on something,

there's nothing wrong with having an ideology.

There's nothing wrong with a law firm being ideological.

It's It's just that these law firms' ideologies suck.

Well, and that you're laundering it.

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Thanks.