Welcome Consequences : Hogan Lovells Fires Partner for Voicing Her Views on the Dobbs Decision JONATHAN TURLEY
In a column in the Wall Street Journal, Robin Keller, a partner at Hogan Lovells, wrote about being fired from the firm after a distinguished career of 44 years. Keller was not fired for intermingling funds or violating confidentiality of clients. She was fired because she exercised free speech in an internal meeting on the Supreme Court s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women s Health. After Keller expressed her support for the opinion and concern about higher rates of abortions in the black community, a participant complained that she could not breathe and others called her a racist. She was later suspended and reportedly fired.
What is striking about this controversy is that there is not a great deal of disagreement on what was said at the meeting. Take Above the Law, which Keller references in her column. The site has become one of the most vocal anti-free speech sites on the Internet. It recently even defended the virtual elimination of conservative and libertarian faculty at universities as commendable.
In a column entitled White Counsel At Biglaw Firm Spreads Inappropriate And Offensive Theories About Abortion, Gets Suspended, Kathryn Rubino celebrated the welcome consequences for people who share dissenting or unpopular views on such subjects. Rubino expressed disbelief that a white partner who attended HoLove s women s meeting felt it appropriate to chime in with her support of the Dobbs decision.
Lawyers at the firm demanded the firing of Keller and said that they were traumatized by having to hear someone defend the decision on a call to allow people to discuss the decision.
Let s repeat that again . . . these are lawyers who were traumatized because a colleague expressed a dissenting view of abortion, a view held by millions of other Americans as well as many judges and justices. It is a view that has been expressed widely in the media, including by African-American and female commentators.
I can understand how such arguments can insult or enrage others. Pro-life lawyers can also be deeply offended on the other side by pro-choice arguments. Abortion is an area that has torn apart this country for generations. The addition of race only magnifies the passion and anger in such discussions. However, this is an area that raises difficult constitutional, social, racial, economic, and gender issues.
Yet, rather than engage Keller on why they believe that she is wrong, these lawyers asked her to leave the call and then pushed for her to be fired for expressing her views. As we have seen on college campuses, it has become commonplace to seek to silence others rather than to engage them in such debates.
The Nazis used the word Gleichschaltung for the process of successively establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany. It has been variously translated as “coordination”,[2][3][4] “Nazification of state and society”,[5] “synchronization'”, and “bringing into line”,[5] but English texts often use the untranslated German word to convey its unique historical meaning. In their seminal work on National Socialist vernacular, Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, historians Robert Michael and Karin Doerr define Gleichschaltung as: “Consolidation. All of the German Volk s social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy. All opposition to be eliminated.”[6]
–Wikipedia