A former student of Neil Gorsuch at the University of Colorado Law School has written to the Senate Judiciary Committee, describing a class lecture in which Gorsuch said that employers, and particularly law firms, should ask women job seekers their plans for having children in the future, suggesting that women are looking for jobs for the maternity benefits.
The concerns were shared in a letter, posted Sunday evening by the National Employment Lawyers Association and the National Women's Law Center, written by Jennifer Sisk, a 2016 graduate of the University of Colorado Law School. It was sent on Friday to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ranking Member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. […]
On April 19, 2016, Sisk wrote, Judge Gorsuch used a hypothetical from the prepared material for the class, in which a female law student applies for jobs at law firms because the student has a large debt to pay off. The student also intends to have a family with her husband.
"He interrupted our class discussion to ask students how many of us knew women who used their companies for maternity benefits, who used their companies to — in order to have a baby and then leave right away," Sisk said.
She recalled that few students raised their hands and Gorsuch became animated. "He said, 'Come on, guys. All of your hands should be up. Many women do this,'" Sisk said.
In an interview with NPR, Sisk says she wrote to the Judiciary Committee "so that the proper questions could be asked during his confirmation hearings." Sisk said that this was the second-to-last class of the semester, and it was unlikely that Gorsuch was playing a devil's advocate role to spark discussion in the class, and that "hadn't been the style he had been using to sort of raise issues all class, or all semester." She continued, "He kept bringing it back to that this was women taking advantage of their companies, that this was a woman's issue, a woman's problem with having children and disadvantaging their companies by doing that."
Sisk says she raised the issue with University of Colorado Law School senior assistant dean of students Whiting Leary and then-dean Phil Weiser, who told her they disagreed with Gorsuch and that they would speak to him about it at the end of term. Sisk says she didn't follow up with them to see if that happened, and Leary and Weiser didn't respond to NPR's request for a statement. A fellow student from the class, Will Hauptman, says he didn't think that was what Gorsuch was saying at all in the lecture, and that the "seriousness with which the judge asked us to consider these realities reflected his desire to make us aware of them, not any animus against a career or group."
Yeah, sure. This new information—from just last year!—is extremely damning. For one thing, federal law says that these questions have no part in hiring decisions. And no less than late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, no flaming liberal, wrote in 2003 upholding a gender-neutral application of the Family Medical Leave Act that "These mutually reinforcing stereotypes created a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination that forced women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver, and fostered employers' stereotypical views about women's commitment to work and their value to employees." Here's the experience of a potential colleague of Gorsuch's—Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—that is timely to consider.
