August 15, 2023
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
Re: “Why Are So Many of Trump’s Alleged Co-Conspirators Lawyers?” (Opinion by Deborah Pearlstein, August 15, 2023, A22)
To the Editor:
Philosophically empty elite law schools like Harvard and Yale bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the ethical crisis in the legal profession chronicled by Deborah Pearlstein. They train their students to subordinate justice to power. Students graduate without any moral or ethical compass. Prominent Harvard and Yale Law recent examples include Florida Governor and presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis, President Trump’s Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, United States Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her legal advisor Harold Koh, and President George W. Bush’s deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo.
Ethical derelictions among the best and the brightest lawyers is no novelty. Harvard Law graduates masterminded the racist, unconstitutional, concentration camps for 120,000 loyal Japanese Americans in World War II. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy infamously declared, “the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
On July 29, 2021, Ralph Nader and I authored a detailed letter to Harvard Law School Dean John E. Manning urging the inauguration of ethics into the mainstream of instruction or case studies. The courtesy of a reply or acknowledgement was neglected.
A fish rots from the head down.
Sincerely,
Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan and author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy
300 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20001
Phone: 202-465-8728; 703-963-4968 (M)
Email: bruce@feinpoints.com