Jeannie Suk Gersen

A novel lawsuit challenging the federal judiciary's handling of sexual harassment is "emblematic" of all that is wrong with the courts as a workplace, say advocates, who warn that a ruling favoring the judiciary could leave its employees with few options to combat misconduct. ... That lack of statutory protections is one of the reasons why Roe's suit claims the judiciary's failure to address her harassment complaints violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth Amendment, according to professor Jeannie Suk Gersen of Harvard Law School, who is serving as lead counsel on Roe's appeal. “Roe cannot bring a claim under Title VII, or any other federal employment statute, because it does not cover the 30,000 federal judiciary employees,” Gersen said. “That would be an unacceptable gap in legal protection against employment discrimination, if the Constitution did not protect those employees from discrimination.”

Leah is joined by Jeannie Suk Gersen and Deeva Shah to discuss an important case, Roe v. United States, about the procedures for addressing workplace misconduct in the federal courts.

A column by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt observed the early tendency of a totalitarian regime to draft private citizens to conduct “voluntary espionage,” so that “a neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemy than officially appointed police agents.” Echoes of this fear could be felt in the dissents from the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday not to block enforcement of a Texas law that prohibits abortion after roughly the sixth week of pregnancy. The statute, enacted in May, authorizes citizens to file a lawsuit against a party that performs or even unintentionally “aids or abets” such an abortion, and to exact damages of at least ten thousand dollars for each forbidden abortion from that defendant if they win the case. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissenting opinion, “The Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.” Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan also dissented; each penned dissenting opinions emphasizing the novel structure of the legislation, which delegates enforcement to members of the general populace.

... In support of a lawsuit filed by a former public defender in North Carolina, more than 20 current and former law clerks and employees of federally funded public defender’s offices and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington offered firsthand accounts of a system that they say still lacks protections and procedures to hold officials accountable. ... On appeal at the 4th Circuit, Roe is represented by Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen and has the backing of more than 40 public-interest and civil rights organizations, in addition to constitutional scholars. Gersen said in a court filing last week that the judiciary’s internal complaint system was rife with conflicts of interest and failed to provide meaningful review or to stop the harassment. The system “facilitated and aggravated the hostile work environment, which became so intolerable that Roe was forced to resign and lose her career as a federal public defender.”

... Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. ...Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky. The Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen has written that her students “seem more anxious about classroom discussion, and about approaching the law of sexual violence in particular, than they have ever been in my eight years as a law professor.”

Helen Shaw, theater critic at New York Magazine, joins us to discuss the return of Broadway ticket sales in anticipation of September’s reopening. WNYC planning editor Kate Hinds joins us to discuss the stories that the newsroom is covering this week. Laurie Woolever joins us to discuss World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, the final book Anthony Bourdain worked on, completed almost entirely after his death in 2018. Woolever, who was Bourdain's assistant and friend, served as co-author for this entertaining and practical guide to travelling to, eating at, and staying in some of Bourdain’s favorite places. The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in a case that could determine public school's abilities to police student's speech off campus. The case began when a young woman named Brandi Levy sent out an curse-laden Snapchat expressing her frustration at not making the Varsity cheerleading squad, and was suspended from the JV team. Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and New Yorker contributing writer, joins us to discuss the case, known as Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: The story of Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. began when Brandi Levy, a high-school freshman in eastern Pennsylvania, was passed over for the varsity cheerleading team. Levy took to Snapchat to express frustration...According to a coach, some students who saw the posts were “visibly upset” and found them “inappropriate.” Levy was suspended from cheerleading for a year for violating the team’s rules, which require that students “have respect” for the school, coaches, and teammates, avoid “foul language and inappropriate gestures,” and refrain from sharing “negative information regarding cheerleading, cheerleaders, or coaches...on the internet.” The coaches as well as the school district also maintained that she violated a school rule that athletes must conduct themselves during the season “in such a way that the image of the Mahanoy School District would not be tarnished in any manner.” Levy, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a lawsuit, alleging that her suspension from the team violated the First Amendment. Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, which the Justices understood not only to raise the question of whether public schools may discipline students for speech outside of the school-supervised setting but also to implicate public schools’ power to punish students for discrimination, harassment, and bullying.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: The jury trial as we know it evolved from a medieval English practice in which jurors were people in the neighborhood who were already familiar with the parties or the events at issue. They were chosen precisely because they represented the local community’s knowledge of the case. Today, a “jury of one’s peers” consists of fellow-citizens whom we instead ask, ideally, to serve as blank slates: they are chosen for their lack of connection to the events and the ability to put prior views and influences aside in examining the evidence that is presented, and sometimes even dramatized, at trial. On Tuesday, after ten hours of deliberation over the course of two days, a Minneapolis jury found the former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter, for killing George Floyd, last May. In many ways, it was a conventional trial, in which eyewitnesses testified and experts weighed in on the disputed facts. Yet it called to mind a bygone mode in which the jury’s role was grounded in the act of witnessing.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: When I teach criminal law, I always begin with a deceptively simple case. A police officer shot and seriously injured a man who resisted arrest for a misdemeanor of illegal fishing. Did the officer commit the crime of assault? I’ve long thought that the force that police may use in making an arrest reveals one of the most basic facts about our society: that the state has power to inflict violence on us in certain circumstances, in the name of enforcing law. We consider it justified for police officers, unlike ordinary citizens, to inflict violence on individuals—with fists, batons, pepper spray, tasers, guns—up to the point of death, so long as the officer embodies valid legal authority and the amount of force is proportionate to what is needed to get the individual to submit to that authority. So, when police actions result in a person’s death, it is not necessarily a criminal homicide; that depends on whether the police are found to have used an excess of force. The killing of George Floyd, in May, 2020, set off worldwide protests of the deadly and pervasive subordination of Black Americans by the police. The homicide trial of the officer accused of killing Floyd, Derek Chauvin, which began in Minneapolis on March 29th, is focussed on a more discrete question.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: When I was an undergraduate at Yale, in the early nineteen-nineties, I went to the university’s gymnasium one evening each week for a women’s self-defense class. We were instructed on how to fight off would-be rapists with physical force, using our knees, elbows, fingernails, and keys, being sure to mark an attacker’s face for police identification. Walking to my dorm in the dark, I was alert to not being a victim. It was part of the informal feminist curriculum that also included Take Back the Night marches and the slogan “No Means No,” one that dates me to an era when women were trying to defy vulnerability. As a rape counsellor in those days, I remember chuckling with feminist peers when we heard about a new Sexual Offense Prevention Policy at Antioch College. The rules said that consent had to be asked for and given at each new level of sexual activity, with silence conveying a lack of consent. Saturday Night Live mocked the policy: “May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks?” “Yes, you have my permission.” This stilted picture of how sex should proceed seemed absurdly unrealistic and made a small college’s policy a national punch line, despite its serious and understandable aim to prevent rape. At the time, even the category of “date rape,” on which I was trained to educate others, mostly envisioned a forcible act or one imposed on an incapacitated person.

No sooner had Joe Biden won the Presidential election than Republican state legislatures began introducing measures to make voting more difficult in any number of ways, most of which will suppress Democratic turnout at the polls. Stacey Abrams, of Georgia, has called the measures “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Congress has introduced the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1. Jelani Cobb looks at how the bill goes beyond even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in its breadth, and how it will likely fare in the Senate. And Jeannie Suk Gersen speaks with David Remnick about the Supreme Court’s views on voting rights. The Court is currently weighing an Arizona case that will help decide what really counts as discrimination in a voting restriction.

The performer Derek DelGaudio—he’s a little uneasy with the label “magician”—talks with Michael Schulman about the nature of deception, onstage and in life. Jelani Cobb and Jeannie Suk Gersen discuss the most important measure on voting rights since 1965, and its uncertain fate in the Senate and possibly the Supreme Court. Plus, a scholar considers how trans rights look different through an African lens.

Does Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 represent the last gasp of an exhausted moderate tradition or does a potentially powerful center lie dormant in our embattled political system? Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, argues in a series of essays and a book, “Unstable Majorities,” that it is the structure of the two-party system that prevents the center — the moderate majority of American voters — from asserting their dominion over national politics...Fiorina has many allies and many critics in the academic community. Those in general agreement include Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard and a contributing writer to The New Yorker, who wrote in an email: “The fact that Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee and won the presidency in 2020, when there were many great candidates left of him, is evidence that a political center is not only viable but desired by the public.” For a centrist candidate, Gersen argued, “the main principle is compromise rather than all or nothing.” In the case of abortion, for example, the principle of compromise recognizes that the majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal, but also favor some limits on abortion. Retaining a core right of abortion that respects both autonomy of adult individuals to make reproductive decisions and the value of potential fetal life is the approach that will seem acceptable to the majority of Americans and consistent with the Constitution.”

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: Two weeks ago, The New Yorker published my article “Seeking the True Story of the Comfort Women.” I reported on recent claims by J. Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard Law School professor and Japanese legal-studies scholar, who said that the story of Korean “comfort women” forced into sexual servitude for the Japanese Army during the Second World War was, in his words, “pure fiction.” In an article published online by the International Review of Law and Economics, a peer-reviewed journal, Ramseyer asserted that the women were prostitutes who had freely entered contracts for compensated sex work. But, by following investigations into the article by historians of Japan and Korea, and speaking to Ramseyer himself, I found that he had made a multitude of basic errors and that he had no evidence of such contracts. “I thought it would be cool if we could get the contracts” for Korean comfort women, Ramseyer told me. “But I haven’t been able to find it. Certainly you’re not going to find it.” The history of the comfort women has presented a persistent obstacle for decades in the relations between Korea and Japan, which have been characterized by cycles in which Japan alternately acknowledges and denies responsibility, and Korea demands apology and rejects resolutions as insufficient.

When I spoke to the Princeton University legal scholar and political philosopher Robert P. George in August, he offered a vivid zoological metaphor to describe what happens when outrage mobs attack academics. When hunted by lions, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” A herd of elephants, by contrast, will “circle around the vulnerable elephant.” ... George was then recruiting the founding members of an organization designed to fix the collective-action problem that causes academics to scatter like zebras. What had begun as a group of 20 Princeton professors organized to defend academic freedom at one college was rapidly scaling up its ambitions and capacity: It would become a nationwide organization...Today, that organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance, formally issued a manifesto declaring that “an attack on academic freedom anywhere is an attack on academic freedom everywhere,” and committing its nearly 200 members to providing aid and support in defense of “freedom of thought and expression in their work as researchers and writers or in their lives as citizens,” “freedom to design courses and conduct classes using reasonable pedagogical judgment,” and “freedom from ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.” ... Some of the founding members from outside of Princeton include Randall L. Kennedy, Orlando Patterson, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Janet Halley, and Cornel West at Harvard; Brian Leiter and Dorian S. Abbot at the University of Chicago; Sheri Berman at Barnard; and Kathryn L. Lynch at Wellesley.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen: In January, I was outlining an article I hoped to write about a recent judgment by a South Korean court ordering Japan to pay compensation for atrocities committed during the Second World War against “comfort women,” women and girls who were transported to war-front “comfort stations” to provide sexual services to soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army. The women were taken by force or entrapped by deception in many countries in and beyond Asia, but a large number came from Korea, which, at the time, was a colony of Japan. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged widely, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. On January 23rd, Japan announced that the Korean court’s judgment, which ordered a compensation of ninety-one thousand and eight hundred dollars to be paid to each of the twelve Korean comfort women who were plaintiffs in the case (seven of whom had died since it was filed, in 2013), was “extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable.” Japan said that it was not subject to Korea’s jurisdiction and considered the matter to have been previously settled. I was ruminating on how legal decisions relating to Second World War crimes against humanity might help resolve or aggravate historical traumas that seem impossible to leave in the past—in part, because they have been mired in waves of conflict and denial about the truth of what happened.