When I went to law school, the law was a masculine profession. Almost all lawyers were men, and women in my law school class were a small minority who were viewed as pioneers. In the intervening years, the law business has undergone a near-inversion: most law students today are women, and most associates in law firms are women.
Some women, of course, have proved to be great lawyers. I know a number whom I would put in that category. But the general feminization of the legal profession threatens–or promises, take your pick–major cultural changes. This article by Helen Andrews, titled “The Great Feminization,” is intensely interesting. It documents the ways in which our culture has been feminized, and points out the changes–mostly for the worse–that such feminization has entailed.
For now, let’s stick with the law:
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.
These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.
If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive.
Oddly enough, both sides of the political spectrum agree on what those changes will be. The only disagreement is over whether they will be a good thing or a bad thing.
We see this in the Supreme Court. It is not coincidental that the three left-wing justices are all women. The most recent appointee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is perhaps the most nakedly political, and least traditionally rational, justice ever appointed to the Court. Which no doubt is what commended her to Joe Biden, or whoever made the decision to appoint her.
Perhaps there never was a time when judges always made strictly logical decisions, based on an objective reading of the facts and of statutes and precedents. But in the past, that was, at least, the ideal. Today, we see many judges openly participating in the “Resistance,” issuing orders that have little to do with the law, and a great deal to do with Democratic Party priorities. To be fair, a number of them have been men, like Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C.
But I am afraid that liberals are not wrong when they tell us that the increasing feminization of the legal profession will bring about substantive changes–less concern with text, logic and precedent, and more emphasis on feelings and political loyalties. I share Helen Andrews’ concern about what feminization of the legal profession will do to our society.
Can those consequences be avoided? I don’t know. The demographics are baked in: if most law students and young lawyers today are women, most judges and senior lawyers will, before long, also be women. We can only hope that liberals are wrong about the consequences of that change.
