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A recent op-ed from a progressive advocacy group that called on future Democratic presidents to shut Big Law partners out of consideration for the federal judiciary has prompted an uproar of opposition in some corners of the bar while others are nodding their heads.

Law professors, plaintiffs-side trial lawyers, students, public defenders and Big Law lawyers have taken to social media in the past two days to express a full range of feelings on a proposal appearing in the Atlantic by the group Demand Justice to cut "corporate" lawyers from Democratic presidential hopefuls' lists of potential nominees to the bench.

While the proposal's authors admitted that it can be hard to pin down who counts as a corporate lawyer, they said Big Law partners and in-house counsel for big companies would likely fit the bill. They said nearly 60% of federal circuit judges had such backgrounds and urged Democratic politicians to look at civil-rights plaintiffs lawyers, progressive law professors and alumni of the National Labor Relations Board instead of Big Law partners.

To Subodh Chandra, who runs a Cleveland boutique that focuses on plaintiffs-side civil rights cases, the proposal was a breath of fresh air. He said he worked as a large-firm litigator earlier in his career, before becoming a federal prosecutor and as law director for the city of Cleveland. Too many judges, in his view, don't understand damages "that can't be seen on a ledger sheet" and put efficiency ahead of justice.

"Far too few judges at the trial court level and at the appellate level have a background of having represented, over an extended period of their careers, individuals in civil rights cases, reputation cases, where everything is at stake for a single individual," he said. "That experience requires a completely different mindset and skill set than the skill set of responding to general counsels who are representatives of corporate entities."

Others pushed back against a hard-and-fast Big Law ban, citing concerns about lawyers of color or people who grew up with modest means having Big Law partnership, a clear avenue to accumulate wealth, being closed off to them if they want to have a shot at the federal bench

Melissa Murray, a New York University Law School professor who focuses on family and constitutional law, had a Twitter exchange with Brian Fallon, one of the piece's authors, in which he acknowledged such concerns, saying, "If our proposal could be shown to result in fewer [people of color], we would abandon our own rule. But would it?"

In a phone call Thursday, Murray noted that several black judges have worked for corporate clients: U.S. District Judge Victor Bolden of the District of Connecticut was appellate counsel at Wiggin and Dana. Judge Amalya Kearse of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, was a partner at Hughes Hubbard & Reed. Allyson Kay Duncan, the former Fourth Circuit judge, was a partner at Kilpatrick Townsend. And U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has bemoaned the lack of practice diversity of the bench, became a partner at Pavia & Harcourt, where she helped Italian luxury companies go after counterfeiters.

Murray said it was good that progressives were talking about diversity on the bench, saying in her view, there should be more public defenders and union lawyers becoming judges. But she said she didn't feel a hard-and-fast rule against attorneys who have worked for corporate icons was the right approach.

"Under this standard, someone like Roberta Kaplan couldn't be nominated, which is insane to me," she said. Kaplan, a former partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison who now works at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, is known for championing gay marriage and the #MeToo movement in the courts and for working for big corporate clients.

One Big Law partner, who would only speak on the condition that his name not be used, said an inflexible rule against lawyers like him and his colleagues would have disqualified many skilled judges. Just because lawyers represent the big corporations who come knocking doesn't mean they adopt a "corporate" mindset that they apply to cases before them once they're appointed to the bench, the partner said.

"[Demand Justice is] trying to make a point, but they did it by making almost a Swiftian 'Modest Proposal,'" he said, referring to the Irish philosopher who satirically suggested that the poor sell their children to the rich for food as a way to improve their economic standing.

Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, agreed that diverse backgrounds should be a factor for considering future judges, but also spoke out against a bright-line rule against Big Law. She chairs a committee that advises Massachusetts' senators on good picks for the federal bench, and she noted that it has put forth employment lawyers, environmental lawyers and other nontraditional candidates because it has cast a wide net.

One well-known progressive lawyer who declined to be identified, citing the political sensitivity of the matter, said he supported widening the net, but said "it would be extreme and unreasonable" to shut out lawyers who had, at one point or another, gone to work for corporate interests.

"Presidents from both parties have historically lavished nominations on prosecutors and law firm partners, while excluding most other lawyers, and it's exciting to see calls for a rebalancing of the scales if a Democrat wins the 2020 election," the lawyer wrote in an email. "This should be a point that all progressives can agree on, without creating a circular firing squad to debate which kinds of diversity matter most."

Another Line of Nominees

But Christopher Kang, chief counsel to Demand Justice and one of the op-ed's co-authors, said there are plenty of racial and ethnic minorities, women and LGBTQ candidates who are qualified for the bench outside of Big Law. Public defenders, plaintiffs' lawyers, union lawyers and public-interest lawyers bring professional diversity and are just as capable of being good judges as counsel to big corporations, but have traditionally been filtered out, said Kang, who worked on judicial nominations in the Obama administration.

"It's not as if anyone's entitled to a judgeship," he said in an interview. "We're not saying that corporate lawyers are evil. What we're saying, though, is that they've had their turn. They've had their turn for decades."

As of Friday, it appeared that only one top presidential candidate has commented on Demand Justice's proposal so far. In a tweet linking to the article, Warren said, "I've argued for years that corporate capture of the federal courts is a serious problem. It's getting worse. The next president must address it—and that starts by committing to dramatically increase the professional diversity of the federal bench."

The campaigns of 10 other candidates—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard—did not respond to requests for comments sent Thursday by Law.com.

Other lawyers said Big Law can foster a pro-corporate mentality: whatever liberal bona fides such lawyers may have go out the window when they make it their job to help big companies defeat lawsuits brought by wronged workers or consumers.

The Atlantic article specifically named Neal Katyal of Hogan Lovells as an example of such a lawyer, noting that despite his criticisms of President Donald Trump, he still took positions that undercut public-sector unions. Katyal didn't respond to a request for comment.

Chandra, the Cleveland litigator, said it was important to keep the big picture in mind.

"A lot of people are reacting to the Atlantic article with a 'well, gee, what about me' mentality," he said. But over time, he added, Democrats' nominations of elite lawyers has "resulted in more decisions—not just the end result, but ultimately more procedural decisions—that are more protective of powerful interests."