University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, no stranger to controversy, opined during a YouTube conversation with Brown Professor Glenn Loury a couple of days ago that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford should have stayed quiet about her Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegation.
As noted by the Above the Law blog, Wax said that the “staleness” of the accusation (Ford alleges that this happened 36 years ago) is not fair. She said that this is true even if “bitching about” this decades ago may have resulted in consequences.
The full quote:
I think it’s a stale allegation, I think it violates principles of basic fair play for her to be bringing this up, I think she should have held her tongue, if I were her I would have. I think basic dignity and fairness dictates that, you know, it’s too late, Ms. Ford, even if there would have been consequences to bitching about it at the time, so there’s that.
Wax went so far as to suggest that “even if [Kavanaugh] did” grope Ford, attempt to remove her clothing and cover her mouth to prevent her from crying out for help, she should get over it because Kavanaugh’s life is basically ruined.
“[W]e now are saying that a man is going to pay for the rest of his life for a momentary act of, you know, recklessness, which didn’t leave any permanent, you know, didn’t create any permanent harm, except through this manufactured idea that this is such a horrible, traumatic thing — it’s not a good thing, but honestly, you know?” she said. “The woman is not going to recover from that? And his whole life now is ruined.”
As we alluded to in the opening, Wax has elicited outrage before, also in a conversation with Prof. Loury, when she said black students don’t perform as well as others.
“Here’s a very inconvenient fact Glenn,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half.”
“So you’re telling me that students of color who have served on law review are pretty much in the bottom half of their law classes at Penn?” Loury asked.
“I haven’t done a survey, I haven’t done a systematic study … I have a big, I have a class of 89 or 95 students every year,” Wax responded. “So I see a big chunk of students every year, so I’m going on that because a lot of this data is a closely guarded secret as you can imagine.”
These comments were followed by a student petition for her removal from the school. Wax is still listed among University of Pennsylvania faculty.
[Image via YouTube screengrab]
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