That’s the idea behind Heavyweight, a project that democratizes the aesthetics of (in lieu of access to) legal representation. Heavyweight is a free, online, and open-source tool that lets you give any complaint you have extremely law-firm-looking formatting and letterhead. Importantly, it does so without ever using any language that would actually claim that the letter was written by a lawyer.

Let’s back up for a second. Last month, I had the incredible honor of participating in Rhizome’s 7x7. Rhizome, for folks who don’t know, is an NYC-based organization dedicated to making, celebrating, and preserving web art. And 7x7 is their yearly event where they invite technologists to collaborate with artists to make something new. This year, instead of pairing artists with technologists, they decided, inspired by art collective provocateurs MSCHF, to pair artists with lawyers.¹

The artist I got paired with was the incredible Morry Kolman. If you’ve heard about Morry’s work, it’s probably because of the reporting on how his “traffic cam selfie” project got a cease and desist from the New York Department of Transportation and his incredible response.²

In addition to this stunt, he also told me that he sent a proper letter back to the DoT as well, and - in order to make it look like he had more legal power on his side than just a few calls with friends that were lawyers - made his own letterhead to make it seem more legit. I’d done something similar earlier this year, with my firm putting out an “official statement on the Trump administration’s attack on the rule of law” under our letterhead as well. Taking those together, we knew that we had keyed into something interesting, a decidedly visual and subjective aspect of an otherwise pretty language-driven and objectivity-seeking profession. We became determined to make our contribution to the 7x7 canon based around the most thrilling thing that comes to mind when you think of the law: document formatting.

Lawyers like to think that we’re all about the facts and legal reasoning, but there’s a reason courtroom dramas feature the dramatic closing argument. It’s why lawyers swap stories about rushing to court, closing a big deal last minute, or some other “big moment.” Lawyers are not just not above spectacle, but on some level, it’s what we’re selling.

Having a lawyer show up, or send a letter, instantly changes the power dynamic in a situation. As Morry put it, it’s why getting a cease and desist letter (which is just a letter, it’s not a legal document) causes a moment of “pants shitting.” The contents of the letter, for most people, is beside the point.³ What’s scary is the sense of being targeted by someone who has the power to make your life miserable. That’s part of why lawyer behavior is ethically regulated, including, actually, who is allowed to be on a law firm’s letterhead.⁴

But it’s not just about creating emotion in an opponent— lawyers sell spectacle to their clients. Law is a credence good, which means that it is often quite difficult to tell whether someone is a good lawyer, especially if one isn’t an attorney. People look to external cues to evaluate whether to take someone seriously—from billing rate, email provider, or even the fanciness of an organization’s office.⁵ This often corresponds to looking for qualities that individuals associate with big and fancy law firms, as that’s what a law firm is “supposed” to feel like, and it results in some hilarious aesthetic choices. Take a look at this letterhead from Wachtell (a very fancy law firm) from 2022!

It’s SO UGLY. But it screams law firm.

Heavyweight plays on this phenomenon by making lots of aesthetic choices that law firms make, while not actually using any words that formally indicate “lawyer” (LLP, Esq, etc.). As Morry likes to say, Heavyweight bestows the representation (appearance) of representation (counsel) by avoiding any representation (statement of fact) of legitimacy. Basically, you can have the power dynamic change just based on the aesthetic elements alone, at least if the person who receives the letter isn’t really looking too closely. (Heavyweight letterhead doesn’t have phone numbers or email addresses, which is probably a pretty good indicator that something is amiss in 2025.)

Is that really so different than Wachtell?

People keep asking me “do you actually want people to use it?” To be honest, I’m not sure.

I worry about people using it because I’m not sure it will work. I don’t actually think the letterhead will pass an inspection from anyone who is really paying attention, which is part of what makes it an ethical project, but also less useful for faking a lawyer.

If it does work, I don’t know how to feel. The more successful the letter is at fooling people (and we do have reports of it doing so), the more likely it is that someone might face adverse consequences for pretending that they are legally represented. When I was doing the initial legal research for this project, I could find almost no examples of legal action against non-lawyers for unauthorized practice of law for pretending to be represented by an attorney.

But ultimately, sometimes, having a lawyer-shaped entity show up is all it takes to get assholes to back down or go away. I’m not heartbroken at the idea that someone who doesn’t have the resources to get an attorney might be able to tap into the power of the law via aesthetics. After all, I can’t represent everyone who gets a silly letter.

Notes

In talking about false solutions, it would be easy to talk about technosolutionism, about the idea that technology will save us, but frankly, others have done it already and better than I would. I want to talk about “academic” work.

I write this in my liminal roles as a contingent academic laborer and as an unrepentant advocate who is also a full-time employee of a university. (And not just any university, but Harvard, which occupies a larger space than it deserves in reflections on the academy.) These roles make who the “we” is in “academics” tricky. Although I hope it will be contextually clear what group the pronoun “we” refers to, I have purposefully flagged where I felt conflict in myself about which group I belonged in.

I’ll start, as lawyers interpreting a text unfortunately often do, with the dictionary. In particular, the definitions for academic as an adjective. There are two worth noting:

• “having no practical or useful significance”
• “conforming to the traditions or rules of a school (as of literature or art) or an official academy : CONVENTIONAL.”¹

From my experiences with advocacy, I know that parts of these definitions are false. Scholarship and the work of academics has tremendous practical or useful significance. But I did not learn this from my professors or my academic “peers”. The organizers I have had the pleasure to work with—they know their theory. The abolitionists I know believe in archives. Many independent scholars I read spend far more time engaging with core texts than the tenured academics I work with, although certainly there is some selection bias in those numbers. I know the way in which I move in the world has been changed by scholars and theorists, from Dean Spade² to Sara Ahmed³ to my honored colleague, Sarah T. Hamid.⁴

Yet, we do talk about academic work as “having no practical or useful significance.” Why?

It would be easy to dismiss this as anti-intellectualism. But in my experience, academics themselves are quite invested in the idea that academic work doesn’t matter. Many times, activists who critique academic work take it far more seriously than the academics who produce it. They believe that it matters. What do they (we) know that we (they) don’t?

If I were to theorize, it’s not necessarily what we as academics don’t know, but what we tell ourselves. Universities run on the lie that academic work has no practical significance, even as grad students are told that the “life of the mind” is a thing to aspire to.

We must believe that our work doesn’t matter because if ideas truly matter, how are we supposed to politely disagree? We want the ability to get along at a faculty meeting, “need” to be able to get tenure (for those for whom that is an option). We benefit from being able to eat dinner at the department chair’s house without letting the pain get too thick as we know that there is a direct line between their scholarship and the incarceration of our comrades or the removal of our rights. We have to convince ourselves that a barrier exists between ideas and reality, that somehow, even if we aren’t, our colleagues are air gapped from the world by the proverbial “ivory tower.”

My frequent co-author Maggie Delano helped me articulate this core tension: academics devote our lives to producing ideas because we know that ideas matter, yet to admit that they matter would require changing everything about the institutions that nominally determine the value of our work. The boundaries of academic discourse and the cordiality due to colleagues force us into this double bind. We are not “conforming to the traditions or rules” if we name the consequences of the positions that others hold, if we get upset, or if we implicate ourselves in the work.

A couple of weeks ago, I was proofreading a draft publication. Below my bio was the conflict of interest section, where I declared no conflicts of interest. The paper was about how sex markers show up in the medical system. It is true that no one paid me to write it, and yet, perhaps I was conflicted. Conflicted by my desire to receive adequate medical care as a transgender person, which meant that I took a position consistent with that goal. Conflicted because I know the stakes. Because, in the words of the renowned professor Lorgia García-Peña, “I do not [balance activism and academic work.] My rebellion - my social justice work, scholarship, and teaching - are intrinsically linked. I see my academic work and teaching as liberatory practices.”⁵

We are all conflicted, but only some of us admit it.

Dismissing academic work as unimportant serves ourselves and our career ambitions. It is how some of us attempt to limit the cognitive dissonance of being in community with those who hold ideas antithetical to our existence. Believing that work does not impact the world is how those of us with institutional affiliations preserve the ability to get along with colleagues who promote theories that end (and sometimes begin) in violence and fascism.

Academia offers a false solution to the problem of technology and liberation so long as we cling to the notion that academic ideas are separable from impact. That the ivory tower is a tower, and not the source of a waterfall or a pile of spent nuclear rods at the bottom of the sea.

What would it look like if we took both our and others’ academic work seriously? How would it transform our relationships to our colleagues, to students, to tenure letters? And most importantly, how would it transform our relationship to the world?

If you’re not already a person who uses agendas for meetings, this post is my attempt to convince you of why you should. If you are, you might find the suggested format (at the end) useful or inspiring!

Why meeting agendas?

Broadly, I think of the meeting agenda as a tool to make meetings both more productive and leave more space for being human.¹

What (good) meeting agendas do:

• lay out topics for discussion in advance so people can do prep,
• ensure that decisions are made and next steps are completed in a timely manner and do not fall through the cracks,
• give the attendees shared ownership of meeting success and an understanding of what needs to be accomplished with the time.

The more productive part is probably pretty straightforward - going down a list makes it easier to stay on topic! But the more human part can strike people as odd.

In my experience, agendas make meetings more relaxed. If the items that the team needs to discuss are clearly articulated, then it’s clear how much time we have for checking in, or discussing stuff that’s not strictly required - the human element that builds connection and allows for flexibility.

I also find that having a shared agenda creates shared ownership. Rather than one person trying to get through a huge list of things, all attendees can understand the priority items and help figure out how to allocate collective discussion time. It also makes concrete, which allows for explicit allocation, of the labor of who preps for the meeting. A concrete template can function to disrupt unwritten rules and prevent reliance on the hidden curriculum about how meetings function.

Agenda Logistics:

The purpose of the agenda is the thinking and prep, rather than rigid rule following.

I don’t think an agenda requirement should be a commitment to only discussing the items listed. If something more important comes up, it can be useful to pivot and talk about that instead. In some cases, if there’s not enough time for that discussion, I might suggest we come back to it, or schedule another meeting. Again, the purpose of the agenda is to allow for flexibility while making sure the essentials get handled. Agendas can also mean that you can figure out whether to cancel the meeting - if there’s really not anything to talk about, or it could have been an email, prepping in advance can help you figure that out before you get to the meeting.

In my one-on-ones where there is a clear hierarchy, the more junior person usually creates the agenda. (My students create meeting agendas for me, I create meeting agendas for meetings with my boss, etc.) In meetings that are more consensus-based or between peers, there may be one person who is responsible for handling logistics (an admin or owner on a particular project), a person who is more agenda-minded (usually me, let’s be honest), or it might make sense to rotate responsibilities. However, I would strongly suggest figuring out who is going to make the agenda, and if necessary, reminding folks to add things in advance.

Agenda Template User’s Guide:

This meeting agenda template is aimed at one-on-one meetings or small group meetings. I suspect the free-for-all addition of agenda items would not work past a certain size or for groups where what is up for discussion is not consensus-based. I will only add suggested time chunks if I am really concerned that we will not have enough time to discuss everything.

Prior to March 2020, I used individual documents for each meeting agenda. Now, I usually have one shared running document that covers a long period of meetings (a semester, a year, etc). The most recent days are placed at the top (so that they’re easy to find), with the previous agendas lower down in the document. The only thing to note here is that if you have a meeting where some of the contents might be confidential or not appropriate for future attendees, you will need to be careful to switch over to a new running document or redact any previous agenda items. If there is a calendar invite, I ask folks to link the meeting agenda in the description.

Here’s a word version of this template, with some sample items. A big shout-out to my long ago former student (and now practicing attorney) Andrei Gribakov Jaffe, whose agenda template was the one that mine is based on.²

Agenda Template:

[Date]

Next Steps from Last Meeting (copied over):

Before the meeting, whoever makes the agenda copies over the next steps from the previous week into the top of the meeting agenda. As prep, attendees review the agenda and determine if the next steps are done or if they need to still be done, or if there are blockers worth noting. Sometimes it makes sense to remove completed next steps, or strikethrough/annotate them!

Discussion Items:

You can have standing discussion items - often this looks like specific projects or repeated topics. Any party to the meeting can also add specific discussion items. I often add items over the week between meetings as I think of them.

I usually ask people to include enough detail to allow for pre-thinking as necessary. It can be helpful to link out to other documents or materials if they are necessary background.

If I think an agenda item being on the list will cause stress (“feedback re: job performance”), I try to provide enough context to allow folks to emotionally prepare or otherwise be careful about what I’m writing.

Parking Lot:

For meetings where there are bigger decisions or things to come back to later, it can be useful to just keep those in a spot for future reference. This could be kept in a separate document, depending.

Upcoming Dates:

Vacation days, deadlines, holidays, meetings to prep for - those can all go here. For weekly meetings, these dates usually cover things about a month in advance. Having them here means that both parties can skim them in prep for the meeting/during the meeting to make sure there’s not any discussion that needs to take place around them, or to spot potential conflicts.

Next Steps:

Generally filled in during the meeting, although sometimes folks know what their next steps are and put them in advance. Next steps should always have a person or persons assigned to them, and should ideally have a due date, although depending on the context, that part might be flexible.

Notes

I’ve pulled out the introduction to our remarks, and the full text is linked at the bottom. Thank you so much to Oliver for being such a thoughtful and flexible collaborator on this project.

“We are writing this comment as two experts in technology policy, content moderation, social media, and gender…In addition to our professional expertise, we are also trans people ourselves, which makes us intimately familiar with the type of marginalization Meta imposes on transgender people.

The case before the Oversight Board is an archetypal example of the harm that transgender people attempting to use social media face. In it, two trans people did not violate site policies yet were harmed not only by their images and speech being silenced, but also by the site limiting their ability to crowdfund money for surgery. It is not an isolated incident. In aggregate, both “neutral” policies that are disproportionately enforced against trans users and policies that target trans users have the effect of limiting trans people’s abilities to post content related to their marginalized identity, thus silencing their participation in the public sphere. Issues for transgender users on online platforms cannot be solved by magical thinking around equitable enforcement; they require a deeper reimagination of how bodies are understood and regulated.

Below, we discuss examples and evidence of how these processes play out in practice, and what the Oversight Board can learn from the examples in crafting a decision on the case before it. In doing so, it may be impossible for an organization like Meta to sufficiently limit the cisgender gaze in its own content moderation policies and enforcement to equitably treat transgender users. Fully addressing trans marginalization on Meta may necessitate changes to underlying nudity, sexual solicitation, and other policies to eliminate the engines of disproportionate harm, rather than attempting to create exceptions for transgender users and their content. But it is not just the policies that are problematic here—the enforcement of these policies must be carried out in a way that does not further marginalize trans people on the platform.”

Full Comments

Just to provide a few examples, there’s a law review article about FOSTA called “good intentions and unintended consequences.” Or you could look at the 2018 OC Register article called “The Unintended Consequences of a Well Meaning Anti-Sex-Trafficking Law” (complete with cliche sexy legs 🙄). Even Elizabeth Warren, in the announcement for the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, said “As lawmakers, we are responsible for examining unintended consequences of all legislation, and that includes any impact SESTA-FOSTA may have had on the ability of sex workers to protect themselves from physical or financial abuse.”

But as @cybwhoregology has been pointing out, the narrative of “unintended consequences” is utter nonsense. Negative effects on sex workers (and there were many) were not “unintended.” The text of the law explicitly criminalizes the promotion of prostitution and it’s hard to argue that an interpretation of the law that was clear from its text is unintended. Sex workers and trafficking survivors were very clear about the likely outcome of FOSTA/SESTA prior to its passage. Finally, this narrative is contradicted by what the organizations that supported FOSTA say about their own goals.

1. FOSTA explicitly criminalizes the promotion/facilitation of prostitution that does not involve trafficking.

So the first conclusion I reach when I read these takes is that people have not even skimmed the text of the bill. I don’t really blame them - it’s pretty incomprehensible. But go take a look - the final text is here. I’ll wait.

Okay, do you see why it’s ahistorical to claim that negative effects on sex work were unexpected? Just in case not, I’ll break it down for you.

Look at 18 U.S.C. §2421A - the bottom of the first page. This is a federal criminal provision, created by FOSTA, prohibiting promotion or facilitation of prostitution. Note that this does not require that any sex trafficking took place. The text clearly says that it is a federal crime to run a computer service with the intent to promote or facilitate prostitution of another person.¹ You can have an aggravated violation under 2421A(b) if the website promotes or facilities the prostitution of 5 or more persons, OR acts in reckless disregard of the fact that such conduct contributed to sex trafficking.

I am going to repeat that point again. You can have a criminal charge under FOSTA, including an aggravated criminal charge, without any trafficking taking place at all. Just promotion or facilitation of prostitution (aka consensual sex work).

This concern is not merely hypothetical. The one criminal prosecution that has happened (US v. Martono, about CityXGuide) under 2421A just resulted in a plea deal where the defendant pled guilty to promotion of prostitution and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. Although the Department of Justice talked about trafficking in their press release, they never ultimately charged Martono with trafficking, likely because they could not prove that he had the level of knowledge required.²

As if that wasn’t enough, FOSTA also changed Section 230 (the federal law that previously had limited internet platform’s liability) to also allow for state criminal charges against platforms based solely on conduct related to sex work, so long as the conduct underlying the charge is based on 2421A.³

You cannot pass a bill that creates additional federal criminal charges and removes immunity from state criminal charges for the promotion/facilitation of prostitution and then claim that negative effects on sex work were an accident! If the people who passed this bill, and those that advocated for it, didn’t want to harm sex workers, they shouldn’t have passed a bill that created additional crimes for the promotion of prosititution.⁴

2. Sex workers were incredibly clear about the likely impact of SESTA/FOSTA before and at the time of its passage.

The second reason that the narrative that the negative outcomes of FOSTA on sex workers was an unintended consequence is nonsense is because it requires erasing (or ignoring) the people who pointed out contemporaneously that the bills were going to harm sex workers.

If you want receipts, there is the Survivors Against SESTA page from 2018 that encouraged folks to call their Senators to explain how FOSTA/SESTA would harm sex workers. Survivors Against SESTA also produced a one-pager on why sex workers need online spaces. Oh, and here’s their one-pager on how FOSTA and SESTA would harm workers. New Orleans Harm Reduction has a page from 2018 where sex workers outlined materials as part of the social media campaign against FOSTA.

Media even covered these concerns! Here’s a contemporaneous article from Melissa Gira Grant quoting sex workers’ rights experts about the negative impact of either FOSTA or SESTA on sex workers. And there’s a FastCompany article with a tweet from Kate D’Adamo, who said “I was a #sexworker organizer for years in NYC. #FOSTA would undermine almost every single thing I would tell people for how to stay alive. ALL screening, ALL peer references, ALL bad date lists I could send. #SurvivorsAgainstFOSTA.”

It’s also worth checking out the #LetUsSurvive or #SurvivorsAgainstSESTA hashtag, where you can still find many of the posts that people made prior to FOSTA’s passage. (Although the historical record is obviously incomplete because of account deletions, caused in part by platforms’ fear of liability under FOSTA. I believe Alanis Morissette would call that ironic.)

FOSTA and SESTA were two bills that were advocated for by different organizations that were combined into one, giant, bad, law. If SESTA alone was passed, it would have been plausible to argue that anti-sex work effects were collateral damage to efforts to prevent sex trafficking, if not for the accurate predictions about consequences of the bill. In short, sex workers expected these consequences, and said quite clearly that these were the likely outcomes. To quote Bardot Smith, “WHORES TOLD YOU.”

3. Many of the people who advocated for the bill saw increasing the difficulty of engaging in consensual sex work as a feature of the bill, not a bug.

Content warning for language that ignores sex worker agency - skip the next paragraph if that’s harmful to you.

It’s not just that calling the effects unintended erases sex workers’ advocacy and labor. It also ignores the fact that some people who oppose “sex trafficking” often do want to eliminate all sex work. For example, one supporter of the bills was CATW (the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women). CATW explicitly seeks to end what they call “sexual exploitation,” which it defines as possible “only if no woman or girl is trafficked, exploited or prostituted in the sex trade.”⁵ So from the angle of organizations like CATW, as well as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly known as Morality in Media), and others, the harm to sex workers (who they often do not believe are legitimate stakeholders) is, in fact, a feature, not a bug. If you’re looking for a useful summary of how this dynamic plays out in reporting, I suggest this piece from WHYY Philadelphia. In it, someone who works for CATW and who is speaking from their experience being trafficked makes the claim that “Sex is not work, and work is not sex. And although I recognize that there is a population of people who self-identify as sex workers, it’s really a term that’s used to mask the inherent harms that come with prostitution.” That’s not a statement that is consistent with the idea that harm to sex workers is an unintended result of anti-trafficking efforts.

Of course, this debate goes back far further than section 230 - it’s a rehashing of a set of conversations that took place during the white feminist sex wars of the 1970s. Far more eloquent people than I have written about how it is true that the binary between sex trafficking and sex work does not do a good job of capturing folks’ experiences, but that’s because it is a product of whorephobia. Whorephobia comes down to the idea that there is something uniquely damaging about work that involves sex, rather than the damage coming from society’s distaste for sex work and the stigma that comes along with that and criminalization.⁶ (Just to be clear - there is not. Many of the harms that people articulate as coming from this kind of work come from criminalization itself, as well as the lack of affirming health and social services.) Fundamentally, it is impossible to truly respect and listen to sex workers and believe that the goal should be the elimination of sex work, unless you also believe that all work should be eliminated.⁷

To pull us back to FOSTA, I suspect most mainstream technology policy organizations (and reporters, and pundits/scholars) do not want to comment on or engage with the fact that some (but not, by any means, all) anti-sex trafficking organizations believe that all sex work is inherently exploitive or leads to sex trafficking. Thus, the argumentative move seems to be to suggest that the intentions of the people who promoted FOSTA/SESTA were good and the harm to sex workers was unexpected. I understand this from a realpolitik perspective - the politics of the anti-trafficking space can seem complicated, and no one wants to appear to be pro-trafficking. And admitting you’ve caused harm is hard! However, again, pretending that prostitution was “accidentally included” or that FOSTA was a bill that was only aimed at ending what the law defines as sex trafficking is at best, revisionism.

Conclusion:

Most people who talk about FOSTA’s unintended consequences are not bad people, nor are they trying to erase or ignore sex workers. But the narrative that sex workers were “collateral damage” of an anti-trafficking bill is ahistorical and compounds the harm. Please, please, stop saying that the effects were unintended.

Did you find this post useful? Please throw some money at Hacking//Hustling, who has been working to cultivate a better understanding of the impacts of FOSTA. You can donate here.

Thank you to Danielle Blunt and Riana Pfefferkorn, who provided very helpful feedback on this post! All mistakes are my own.

Notes

As someone who has to articulate to students what clear standards look like in a profession that lacks them, I always worry about using the word “professionalism.” What is professionalism, and how does one teach it?

At its best, professionalism encompasses a number of small, everyday tasks that I associate with high quality work products or making life easier for those around us. Common tasks that fall under the professionalism umbrella include wearing the correct clothes to court, reviewing final work product to make sure the formatting is perfect, or showing up on time and with an agenda to meetings.

What’s wrong with that? In so many legal spaces, professionalism comes to stand in for the unnamable, the je ne sais quoi.¹ It means “looks like us” or “acts like us.” Professionalism implicitly relies on the stereotypes about who belongs in law and who does not. Every time I facilitate discussions about this, I learn about new things piss me off. Some examples:

• First generation students are told that during oral argument, you shouldn’t use hand gestures because it’s unprofessional.
• Female students are held to dress code requirements that only work for some bodies, not to mention some budgets.
• Students of color are expected to constantly code switch to fit the idea of what a legal practitioner looks like.
• Neurodivergent students get told to make eye-contact in meetings where it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference other than making a supervisor feel more powerful.

The list goes on and on and on. Unprofessional becomes the catch all for “not acting like me,” when deployed by white, straight, often male, supervisors. Professionalism is so racist, ableist, classist, and sexist that it feels like it can’t be rescued from itself.

If a student dares to ask why these things matter, professionalism is usually framed in terms of respect for legal institutions. We stand when the judge enters because it is respectful. We wear a suit to court because we respect the institution. But as someone who is often disrespected or harmed by legal institutions, I find it hard to act from this frame. Call me petty, but legal institutions so rarely go out of their way to respect me or the people I care about. Performing respect for them doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning.

But over time, I’ve come to believe there are some skills at the heart of professionalism that might be worth saving, and as a teacher, I am always trying to balance teaching the way things should be with the way things are. So when I have to teach it, I try to talk about professionalism as a way of caring about others around us. Professionalism, at its best, is as an act of love and belief towards those we work with, rather than a set of behavioral standards that we have to live up to. We review final documents for typos because taking the time to produce high quality, clean, work product shows our clients that they matter to us. We send agendas, and show up on time because we care about those we’re meeting with, and not wasting their time is a way to express that care. And when these norms do not communicate care - when they will not succeed in making our people feel cared for, we can let them go.

Framing professionalism as an act of care for others also helps us build skills in setting boundaries. There are some things I won’t do, no matter how much I care about my client or my students. Each person may decide for themselves what steps they may take to care for others, and what steps they cannot take out of care for themselves. I am not going to accept being misgendered, even if it would be “disrespectful” to interrupt someone.

This reframing, of course, does not solve all professionalism’s problems. As Kose pointed out to me, care can be weaponized in toxic ways - see the discourse around viewing a workplace as a family, which often makes it harder to assert reasonable boundaries. And care work requirements still disproportionately fall on minoritized people, and that means we must be vigilant in our views about who needs to be professional. But if professionalism is about care, we can use this frame to ask for more from the students (and lawyers) who traditionally perform less care work. Taking notes, doing ministerial tasks, prepping for meetings, “acting professional” - these are things we can redistribute among team members, when we acknowledge them as grounded in care, not respect. We can accept dress codes for the utter horseshit that they are and still follow them, because we care about our clients. For me, this reframe helps solve a fundamental problem - how to both understand professionalism’s role in gatekeeping the profession, but still teach it in ways that allow students to see how it might matter.

Notes

Chair Eldridge, Chair Day, and the Members of the Committee on the Judiciary,

Thank you for having me today. My name is Kendra Albert, and I am an attorney at Harvard Law School, where I teach in the Cyberlaw Clinic. I am also an out transgender person, and I serve as the Director of the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment. My practice at the Cyberlaw Clinic focuses on the free speech impacts of regulation of sex work. I am here today to oppose bill H.1761/S.940 and to support bill H.1800/S.992.

Massachusetts has long been a national leader in evidence-based policy. What we know about sex work, both from what sex workers tell us and from research, is that harm to sex workers comes primarily from stigma and criminalization, not from the work itself. Because of that, repealing common nightwalking is vital - it removes one avenue that police use to profile sex workers and people who police believe look like sex workers. But merely erasing the most antiquated language while continuing to incentivize police targeting clients, as H.1761 does, just moves the problem around.

Making Massachusetts follow the evidence leads to supporting full decriminalization, not asymmetric criminalization under the guise of helping sex workers access exit services. Studies show that the model suggested by the advocates of H.1761/S.940 (generally called the “Nordic Model”) leads to reluctance to call police for help and may exacerbate violence. A peer-reviewed study released in Social Science of five “nordic” jurisdictions in Canada found that almost one third of sex workers surveyed would be unable to call 911 if there was an emergency.¹ In another study from Montreal, sex workers reported dramatic increases in violence after Nordic-style policing was implemented.² In fact, sex workers in Canada have had to file lawsuits to try to end human rights harms that comes from these failed policies. There is no evidence that the Nordic model reduces demand for sex work, nor that it reduces human trafficking.

Sex workers in Massachusetts deserve better than a policy intervention that has already failed elsewhere. For those reasons, I encourage you to support full decriminalization, H.1867, or as an interim step, the full repeal of the common nightwalking crime, H.1800/S.992, rather than providing favorable reviews on H.1761/S.940.

Thank you for your time and the opportunity to testify.

Apologies from a person who did or was complicit in a harmful act must be meaningful and consonant with the magnitude of the harm.

Specifically, in order for me personally to find it meaningful, the apology must include:

• naming the harm that they did, specifically
  • Leaving others to explain or contextualize the shitty thing is not acceptable.
• explaining how they became aware that harm was done
  • If appropriate, crediting people who attempted to intervene or report.
• stating very clearly what exact steps they are taking to make it right, including a description of how those steps address problems they caused
  • Giving money to a cause is insufficient if giving money to a cause would not ensure that the harmful thing would not happen again.
• stating who will hold them accountable for those steps.
  • It is not appropriate to expect those harmed to hold them accountable.
  • Everyone often in practice means no one - it is better to be specific.
  • In some circumstances it may be appropriate to pay someone (up front) to help the person with their accountability.

The apology must not:

• trivializing the harm caused (no “I’m sorry if you were offended.”)
• prioritize excuses, explaining their thought process, or centering themselves over the harm caused

The person apologizing must also have mitigated or attempted to mitigate harm caused by any protective steps they took or an institution took on their behalf. Even the most heartfelt apology is hard to take seriously if someone is still threatening legal action against whistleblowers or stonewalling further investigation.

If there is a specific person who has been most significantly harmed by the bad action, their views on the acceptability of a public response are important to me but not controlling of whether I think an apology is meaningful.

Clarifying Questions:

But what about some specific circumstance where these rules don’t make sense?

That’s a good question! Obviously, each situation is unique, and there may be instances where some of the items here are not going to be applicable. But if I find myself trying to rules lawyer myself into thinking that an apology merits forgiveness or public support, that’s a good opportunity to check myself.

But an apology like the one you suggest would expose someone to liability!

Good! Or shall I say - that is part of being held accountable, because it represents a person accepting at least some of consequences of their actions, to the extent that the legal system dispenses those. It also means that the apologizer is willing to give up something of value to deal with the harm they have caused, which can be an important test of their seriousness.

“When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

Chatham House-by-default seems to have become a norm in certain parts of academia and civil society. Academic institutions often use it because not attributing allows for participation/insights from people who may have institutional constraints on sharing their experiences/opinions. For example, folks who work for a government entity or a corporation are often constrained in what they are able to say. Using the Chatham House Rule allows them to speak/participate.¹

But for those of us who are not subject to those institutional strictures and who have often given up opportunities to remain so, Chatham-by-default can mean that our participation in these conversations is just unacknowledged (and usually unpaid) labor. If I say something useful or valuable during a conversation, and it makes it into a concrete output (like a report), the Chatham House Rule ensures that I don’t receive any credit for that outside the context of the people who were potentially in the room in the first place. If others find the idea compelling and end up repeating it, I may never get credit, making it harder to build credibility as an expert.

Relying on memory rather than formal credit also has distributional consequences because of sexism and racism. Not recording attribution is likely to have disproportionately negative effects on those who are already less likely to be recognized as having important contributions. (This phenomenon is sometimes called “he-peating” or “rewhiting.”)

Many interpretations of the Chatham House Rule produce summary documents that don’t allow for an understanding of power dynamics or the incentives of speakers. It matters who said what! If the [Big Company] lobbyist says that the problem is that not enough people trust corporations to do the right thing, a reader should weigh that comment differently than if someone who works for [Consumer Rights Group] says that. Positionality beyond affiliations is also relevant - especially as we think about underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people in spaces like technology policy. (We could also imagine a version of the rule that allows for some sharing of information about the background of a speaker. One difficulty could be that such information requires a sufficient number of speakers of a particular background in the room so that an identification is not immediately revealing.)

Finally, the Chatham House rule seems to operate on an implicit assumption that additional information is sufficient reward for participation in conversations, as opposed to credit for insights/perspectives. As someone who believes incredibly strongly in paying participants for their time and efforts, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with academic norms that lead to extractive knowledge creation.

The Chatham House Rule, as a default practice with no option of attribution, privileges the needs of those who are not willing to have their views be attributed over people who benefit from attribution and credit. I wish more organizers would think critically about whose participation is rewarded and encouraged by Chatham House, rather than assuming that it is good for everyone. As part of this process, organizers could directly consult participants in knowledge creation about what is useful to them - whether that’s payment, anonymity, or credit, and then endeavor to provide that.

Thank you to Jonathan Zittrain, Afsaneh Rigot, Wendy Seltzer, and some anonymous reviewers who read and provided feedback on a draft. Very meta.

Notes

I’ll quote the beginning here: 

“Many gender-neutral restrooms and locker rooms are behind locked doors.  Not in the same sense that all bathroom doors are locked; rather, these spaces can be accessed only by either being lucky enough to slip in behind someone with authorization, or by pleading one’s case before some sort of decision maker—a literal gatekeeper.  In the most immediate sense, it’s the gym manager (“Can I use the temporary gender neutral facility?”), the information desk person (“Can you let me into the family restroom?”), or the key card provisioner (“I need access to the other floor because that’s where the bathroom I can use is. Please.”).

Other aspects of gender-neutral life can require a different, but intimately related, set of recitations to a more metaphorical set of gatekeepers.  Sometimes these pleas are heard by a therapist (“Can you give me a diagnosis so I can get this covered by my insurance?”), a doctor (“Please just let me have the anti-depressants so I don’t become another suicide statistic.”), or a judge (“Your honor, don’t make me publish my old name and new name in the newspaper in order to effectuate my name change.”).  Other times they are addressed to an HR manager (“My colleague called me by the wrong pronouns for the entire meeting and my boss didn’t correct him.”), a lawyer (“The new shift manager kept snickering about my pronoun pin and marked me as late even when I wasn’t…do you think I have a case?”), or an athletics organizing body (“Look, I just want to lift weights, okay? I don’t care which category I’m in.”).

It is the law that underlies these requests that Professor Jessica Clarke takes up in They, Them, and Theirs, her law review article on nonbinary people.  Rather than focusing on the moral claim that nonbinary people should have their genders taken seriously, Clarke takes up the logistical arguments that critics have mounted against nonbinary gender claims.  Most simply, she argues that including nonbinary people in existing social institutions would not require radical changes to the law.

…

Clarke’s thesis is not wrong.  She ably points out many ways in which nonbinary people can fit easily into existing systems and pushes back against common arguments, from the tyranny of grammar to the imagined threat of sexual predators in restrooms.  There is certainly a strategic argument to support the integration of nonbinary people into existing systems of state-sponsored gender.  But advocates for nonbinary people should not start with a goal of assimilation, even if that is where they end.  

You can read the rest at: https://blog.harvardlawreview.org/their-law/

Image from Vice’s Gender Spectrum Collection.