To the Editor:
Re “How a Law Firm Decided to Fold Instead of Fight,” (entrance web page, March 23):
As the previous professional bono coordinator at a significant New York, legislation agency I’m sufficiently old to have lived by means of McCarthyism, so I learn with dismay your article on the complicity of the Paul, Weiss legislation agency with President Trump. No matter any short-term monetary beneficial properties, the agency is on the fallacious facet of historical past.
We bear in mind Pete Seeger refusing to call names whereas providing to sing a music, Arthur Miller writing “The Crucible” about witch hunts and Edward R. Murrow bravely exposing Senator Joseph McCarthy on the nascent medium of tv, whereas those that testified at the moment are relegated to perfidy or oblivion.
One other hero was Joseph Welch, a companion in a famend Boston legislation agency, who helped topple Senator McCarthy with a memorable confrontation in Congress together with his well-known retort, “Have you ever no sense of decency?”
Highly effective legislation corporations throughout the nation ought to equally step up. Their collective adherence to precept would trigger the administration to lose its energy over legislation corporations. The rule of legislation and democracy would then be strengthened.
Daniel L. Greenberg
New York
The author is a former lawyer in chief on the Authorized Support Society and a founding father of Expertise Justice.
To the Editor:
My grandfather Louis S. Weiss was a founding companion of Paul, Weiss. My father, Louis H. Pollak (who President Trump would have categorized as a “radical left lunatic”), was a federal decide, civil rights advocate and constitutional legislation skilled who labored briefly at that agency. Each of those attorneys would have been horrified by Brad Karp’s capitulation to the Trump administration. They could even have known as the $40 million deal a payoff — and a spineless one at that.
Sally Pollak
Burlington, Vt.
To the Editor:
It’s inconceivable to learn of Paul, Weiss’s capitulation to President Trump and never consider Shakespeare’s well-known line from “Henry VI”: “The very first thing we do, let’s kill all of the attorneys.” Typically interpreted as a criticism of the authorized occupation, the assertion is something however: As an alternative, it displays the conclusion that attorneys are the guardians of society. Or as Supreme Courtroom Justice John Paul Stevens wrote: “As a cautious studying of the textual content will reveal, Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of attorneys is a step within the path of a totalitarian type of authorities.”
The president’s all-out assault on the judiciary and main legislation corporations isn’t just motivated by private grievance and revenge: He, too, understands that the continued existence of a fearless judiciary and a strong cadre of prosecutors and protection attorneys is the best menace to his authoritarian agenda.
Glenn Kurlander
Palm Seaside Gardens, Fla.
The author is a retired companion on the legislation agency Kirkland & Ellis.
To the Editor:
As a authorized historian of Nazi Germany and former affiliate on the legislation agency Paul, Weiss, let me say this to its current wheelers and sellers: In crises, some attorneys rise to the second. You didn’t. Others will. As a result of they lack the institutional safety that you simply get pleasure from, they may face higher dangers. As a result of they lack the institutional leverage that you simply wield, they’ll hope just for smaller successes. However up to now, even lone attorneys have put all the pieces on the road for the rule of legislation.
With all of your credentials, you may be taught from these attorneys, in addition to a lot of your nonlawyer neighbors, that the rule of legislation makes all of the distinction between democracy and tyranny.
Douglas G. Morris
New York
The author is an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Regulation Faculty and a retired assistant federal defender in New York.
To the Editor:
The capitulation of Paul, Weiss to the coercion introduced by President Trump is shameful and harms the resistance to Mr. Trump’s assault on the rule of legislation. It is a second that requires braveness and dedication to the preservation of democracy, a motion that ought to be led by attorneys — the pure guardians of the Structure and the supremacy of legislation.
As a lawyer and retired decide, I’m flabbergasted {that a} legislation agency as vaunted and highly effective as Paul, Weiss would refuse to guide a problem to the Trump administration’s patently illegal try and punish attorneys. It seems that the agency has higher concern for its backside line and the pursuit of favor.
Much more despicable is the agency’s dedication to make use of its authorized muscle, freed from cost, to advertise causes designated by Mr. Trump and to re-examine its personal inside insurance policies coping with equality in its personnel practices. The agency’s settlement with Mr. Trump quantities to unpardonable groveling and full give up.
Gerald Harris
New York
The author is a retired New York Metropolis legal court docket decide.
The Actuality on Campus
To the Editor:
Re “It Is Facing a Campaign of Annihilation: Three Columnists on Trump’s War Against Academia,” by M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens (Opinion, nytimes.com, March 15):
I consider that the lived expertise of these in universities, in precise school rooms, just isn’t what conservatives suppose it’s. That is true for each college and college students.
I’m a progressive, however in my classroom I should not have a progressive agenda. In actual fact, I’ve an instructional agenda. The issue is that the small group of scholars or outsiders who shut down or disrupt conservative audio system’ visits to campus make credible to the general public the concept that universities are seething cauldrons of a leftist witches’ brew. That is what the general public sees, however this isn’t what universities are about. And by some means we have now to make this clear.
Mark Sheldon
Chicago
The author is a professor of philosophy and bioethics at Northwestern College.
To the Editor:
Bret Stephens’s characterization of universities like Columbia and Berkeley as “basically factories of Maoist cadres” is an absurd distortion of actuality and a reckless one at this explicit political second.
I invite Mr. Stephens to come back to Berkeley to fulfill any one in all our 1,000 political science majors, attend one in all our lessons, peruse our syllabuses or learn the analysis we produce. He’ll discover curiosity, critical inquiry and rigor. We offer college students with instruments to consider our world, not with dogma about what to consider.
Scott Straus
Berkeley, Calif.
The author is a professor of political science on the College of California, Berkeley.
Earlier than Child Tech
To the Editor:
Re “Best Tech for Babies? Whatever Works for You,” by Brian X. Chen (Tech Repair column, Enterprise, March 20):
I discovered Mr. Chen’s assessment of all the infant tech gadgets he used together with his toddler daughter miserable. It strengthened how glad I’m to have raised my youngsters at a time once we could possibly be analog mother and father.
The rocking they acquired was from our arms, nevertheless irregular the rhythm. The songs they heard had been from my imperfect voice. The milk they drank was mine, or — later — formulation that was rapidly combined and warmed.
We discovered of their misery once we heard them cry from one other room, with out a visible cue. The white noise they heard was most likely our radiator. They slept or woke with the sunshine of day or the darkish pitch of evening, not smartphone-controlled colours. Their diapers had been modified as a result of we checked them repeatedly. In particular person.
I’m not going to inform you that they grew as much as be good individuals — nobody does — or that these options match everybody’s circumstances. However why not lean into the method of studying to know your youngsters immediately, with out pointless technological interference? It’s good for them, and it’s good for you.
It’s not a nasty place to start out in case you are involved in regards to the decline of empathy in our tradition.
Naomi Segal Deitz
Portland, Ore.
