On the Other Hand

In the City Journal, Walter Olson observes:

Given the hothouse ideological atmosphere of today’s legal academia, it’s quite possible that administrators at Long Island’s Hofstra Law School had no idea that they’d touch off a furor when they invited Lynne Stewart, the disbarred felon and radical lawyer, to lecture on legal ethics. It’s not, after all, as if they were bringing in someone really controversial—someone, say, like Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld.

I have no desire to listen to Lynne Stewart speak on legal ethics, but probably not for the same reasons that have caused the instant controversy. Ms. Stewart is an old, hard-Left ideologue, and accordingly, lawyer or no, has no "legal ethics" as that term is normally understood. If she can promote the cause, that's what's important, and outdated notions of "right" and "wrong" are hopelessly bourgeois, and irrelevant to the ongoing class struggle. Because of this, she has nothing to say -- she operates in a world wholly foreign to Western liberal democracy. It's not that she's a bad person, or that I'm awed by the irony of it, it's just that she's irrelevant to any serious discussion of legal ethics.