Found here, "What Harassers Take From All of Us" for when they finally give it a static link. Well worth the read but probably as context afterwards.
- Examples matter. Exposure matters. And exposure to Heidi Bond’s work mattered enough to me that I still remember it now, over a decade later.
But I also remember that shortly after law school, Heidi Bond disappeared from public life. Letters of Marque was deleted. She never became a law professor, even after finishing her subsequent clerkships with Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy. I occasionally wondered idly where she had gone, but never really looked for her — the closest I came was occasionally googling her old guest posts to reassure myself I hadn’t invented her entirely.
The picture alone makes me uneasy. Rebecca Traister made a similar point that stuck with me: We can't imagine what the world would've looked like if this systemic behavior hadn't been in place. We don't have the buildings that were built by women or the food that was cooked by women or the comedy that was written and performed by women or the art that would've been made by women or the books that would've been written by women or the political narrative that would've been told by women or the candidates and politicians and political leadership that should've been female. Well worth the read but probably as context afterwards.
There is a study that was just done recently by a researcher who found that 50 percent of women who experience harassment leave their jobs within two years of experiencing that harassment. When the harassment is particularly grave, that's 80 percent, and many of them leave their professions altogether.
Great write-up. The author was no doubt a superstar to get a clerkship with Kozinski and then with SCOTUS Justices O’Connor and Kennedy. Ironically, given AK's directive, she quit law to write historical romance novels full-time. As an aside, I have a cousin with a PhD in Eng. Lit. from Harvard who loves that Harlequin Romance type of stuff. She knows it is shit but instead of watching an hour of mindless tv each night, that is her thing.
I’m conflicted here. Showing porn to a subordinate is clearly bad. No question about that. On the other hand, continuing a job when your employer calls you a slave? Sure, leaving a long sought after position is going to sting, but when does a person accept that their ambition is leading them in the wrong direction?
To put that in perspective, with her resume she could have been making maybe $200K a year as a first year lawyer.
The Scientologists have done much more with less and they don't have the advantage of unquestioning esteem in the eyes of society.This is what he had to say in that article: “A Supreme Court clerkship is not simply a job, a great honor, or a stepping stone to plum jobs in the legal profession—it is membership in a family, with correlative rights and responsibilities…. The clerk has a duty of diligence, loyalty, and confidentiality, both to the Justice who appoints him and to the other Justices. He also has a duty of loyalty to his fellow clerks and to other Court employees. In exchange, the clerk gets to work in the headiest environment to which any young lawyer could aspire and enjoy the luxury of open, robust, and unbridled debate about our nation’s most pressing legal issues….”
It is the legal profession. In my time, the most coveted law student position in Canada was with a firm that had the rhyming nickname Slaveys. It is a badge of honor to be willing to and handle being worked almost to death. It is not a mistake that the Employment Standards Act exempts lawyers from maximum hour of work requirements.
I think there's an important difference between hardship due to you being on the wrong path, and hardship due to bad conduct by people with power you encounter along that path. I also think conflating the two smacks of victim-blaming, so getting the difference right is important. For example, say a medical student is distressed because an attending physician frequently overreacts at small, med student-type mistakes and berates them mercilessly. I think we could all agree that the problem here lies not with the student's ambition of being a doctor, but with the attending's poor temper. If the student can't overcome their distress at seeing blood or other bodily fluids, then the problem is with their choice of direction and the fact that their capabilities don't match their ambition. In this case, Bond's ambition to be a lawyer doesn't appear to be the problem. The problem is a judge like Kozinski who would take advantage of his power over his clerks' careers. I think we need to be careful not to roll human misconduct (sexual and otherwise) into the list of things that we accept as obstacles to achievement. There is a point of distress and suffering where a person should stop and reevaluate if their ambitions and choices aren't right for them, but we shouldn't accept it when the malice or misconduct of a person's superior leads them to that point....when does a person accept that their ambition is leading them in the wrong direction?