He is a black man born just two years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, outlawing racial discrimination against people who had been at risk of enslavement barely a century before. He is an alumnus of the same prestigious, historically black college from which Martin Luther King Jr. graduated, and he was hand-picked by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to join the faculty of the Harvard Law School. He is the epitome of the American dream, the promise that pure grit, self-determination, and hard work will pay off in the present of American exceptionalism.
And now, Ronald Sullivan Jr. has become the focal point of left-wing ire. As a result, Harvard has fired one of the nation’s top criminal defense attorneys from his post as faculty dean of the college’s Winthrop House. The reason? Sullivan has agreed to defend alleged serial rapist and former Hollywood kingmaker Harvey Weinstein. Previously, he had represented the late monster and football player Aaron Hernandez, as well as the family of Michael Brown, who was killed in the act of assaulting a police officer.
Now, the students of Harvard University have come to collect another scalp. More horrifying, the administration is abetting this nonsense by removing Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson from their posts as the first black faculty deans in Harvard’s history in a way calculated to humiliate them.
Sullivan has spent more than two decades carrying on the tradition of his great American predecessors who gave their clients the best defense possible, no matter how unpopular they are. This goes back at least as far as John Adams, who represented the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre.
Americans understood and respected the legal profession in the 18th century, but times have regressed — at least at Harvard. Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana wrote to students and staff at Winthrop:
One can hardly read Khurana’s equivocation without balking at the sheer disdain for liberal values. Harvard, here, chalks up the “untenable” discord in Winthrop not to man-baby college students throwing tantrums over a famous criminal defense attorney being hired to defend a famous alleged criminal, but rather to Sullivan himself doing his damned job.
Harvey Weinstein is a monster who deserves his fate. But he also deserves and has a right to counsel. Legally speaking, this right is entrenched in the Sixth Amendment, which explicitly prescribes that “the accused shall enjoy the right” to counsel. Ethically speaking, we understand that we cannot have full faith in the application of law without the semblance of a fair trial, something he could not get if all lawyers refused to represent him for fear of professional repercussions.
Pragmatically speaking, the public flagellation of Sullivan marks a terrifying turning point, one in which the sins of the accused percolate onto the reputations of their attorneys. Terrible people hire good attorneys every day. Gripe with malfeasance by said legal teams, sure, but to impugn a lawyer for literally doing his job is unconscionable.
For what its worth, Harvard’s horror has unified ire across the ideological spectrum.
I loathe Harvey Weinstein.
And Ronald Sullivan is my dear friend.
Ronald has helped THOUSANDS of innocent people be exonerated. Not sure any single attorney has done more in the modern era.
Sad that Harvard did this. Even horrible people need attorneys.https://t.co/vddwWHBqri
— Shaun King (@shaunking) May 12, 2019
Infuriating: Harvard unilaterally surrenders to the student mob, fires faculty dean Ronald Sullivan for the crime of thinking Harvey Weinstein deserves good legal representation (a foundational principle of Enlightened justice) https://t.co/cc9YP5s9nK (1)
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) May 12, 2019
Harvard students allege that Sullivan had created other problems about the college, charging him and Robinson with inculcating a “climate of hostility and suspicion” among paid staff due to, well, being a bad boss.
Most House Admins stay on for close to a decade. Winthrop has had 10 in the last decade. In 2016 a “disloyal” tutor was allegedly threatened with dismissal, and in response nearly half of Winthrop’s tutors (similar to RAs at other schools, but grad studentsor postgrads) made a
— lesbian mothman (@verysmallriver) May 12, 2019
The rage directed toward Sullivan may very well stem from underlying paranoia about his supposed mismanagement of adult children attending Harvard University. Students paying six figures to obtain the best education on the planet may really be peeved that Sullivan didn’t properly pat away their tears and wipe their chins after dinner. But to take out their frustrations through his representation isn’t just cowardly. It’s toxic to fundamental American values and perhaps the most slippery slope we’ve ever approached in contemporary academia.
