As students living in the United States, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the recent escalation in US military aggression across the Middle East and the rest of the world. Rather, this is simply the name chosen by a small subset of the students who, using a general Unbound” heading, anonymously launched the Firmly Refuse” campaign in the Spring of 2012, criticizing several of the major law firms which interview on campus, and urging students to think hard about whether or not to interview with them.
In a similar spirit of willful blindness, Media Matters describes Derrick Bell as a respected academic” and an influential figure in the Civil Rights movement” This portrayal is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s pathetic characterization, a few years back, of Bill Ayers as just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” But just as the reality of Bill Ayers was far more interesting than Obama indicated at that time, the truth about Derrick Bell is likewise far more compelling than the pablum the left has provided in the wake of this latest video.
In the past, through the combined efforts of student organizers, the law school community and the school’s Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, HLS raised financial support in the months following 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and sent more than 30 students to the Gulf Coast the following January to do pro bono legal work and participate in relief efforts.
We identify ourselves as Harvard Law Unbound”as an aspirational reference — we sincerely believe that we are the ones who are most authentically speaking for a vision of what Harvard Law School can become, an institution unbound of the corruption and conflict of interest that we currently find operating at its core.
Thus a very small group of us launched the 2nd poster campaign about the old Harkness Commons building being renamed for a cowardly tax cheat and then, after that campaign was suppressed, the 3rd poster campaign about the Harvard Law administration allowing Attorney General Eric Holder to speak on campus in the midst of an ethics scandal, when the last Attorney General to visit campus in the midst of an ethics scandal (in 2007) was heckled and harassed by students, without objection by the administration.
