At 10:08 a.m., Central Standard Time, a Google search for the phrase “retard
ed lawyers” returned about 732,000 results. Most of them were along these lines:
Justice Looking for Mentally Retarded Lawyers, Really
Our government at work.Justice Department Advertising Job For Retarded Lawyers
U.S. Department of Justice Seeks to Hire Mentally Retarded Trial Lawyers for Voting Division
…
And so on. We can’t help but notice that while some bloggers have invoked Rahm Emanuel’s unfortunate comparison of fellow Democrats to the mentally retarded, no one seems to recall the tale of James G. Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior.
At a press conference on September 21, 1983, Mr. Watt said of his staff, “I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.” Outraged and insulted by the idea that their constituents might be considered sufficiently talented to serve on the staff of an American cabinet secretary, African American, Jewish, disability rights and women’s advocacy groups called for his head on a pike. they had to settle for his resignation, 18 days later.
What sparked this week’s kerfuffle was a job posting at the United States Department of Justice. The relevant paragraph lives here:
The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine. Applicants who meet the qualification requirements and are able to perform the essential functions of the position with or without reasonable accommodation are encouraged to identify targeted disabilities in response to the questions in the Avue application system seeking that information. For additional information for applicants with targeted disabilities, please contact the Civil Rights Division’s Disability Program Manager, Diane Petrie, at (202) 514-3934; see also http://www.jan.wvu.edu/LEAD/index.htm and http://www.opm.gov/disability/PeopleWithDisabilities.asp.
Most of the commentary has latched on to the parts of the job announcement having to do with mental retardation. Few people nowadays seriously think that people who are missing limbs can’t function as trial lawyers. It gets a little iffy when the discussion turns to blindness or hearing loss, but that’s a different question.
We think most of the humor is misplaced, but first some background.
We went to law school with a guy who was afflicted with some kind of degenerative nerve disease, which affected his speech. It affected his gait and his handwriting, too, but it was most noticeable when he talked. In fact, if you were just listening to him and didn’t know that he was in law school, you might think he was retarded, or perhaps had sustained a closed head injury.
Nothing of the sort. He was actually a pretty sharp guy, and he graduated with the rest of our class and passed the state bar examination. Despite not being mentally retarded he probably has one of the Justice Department’s “targeted disabilities”, viz., “partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder… severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.” Some of which could be mistaken for mental retardation.
The best explanation we’ve seen comes from Eugene Volokh,at Volokh Conspiracy, who says:
I’m pretty sure I know what happened here: Boilerplate that was designed for a wide range of federal jobs — including the ones (probably a relatively small percentage of all federal jobs) for which one can be qualified even though one is mentally retarded — is just being copied here; and the limitation to “qualified applicants” who “are able to perform the essential functions of the position” ensures that no mentally retarded lawyers will indeed be hired. Still, the result looks pretty striking in a call for applications from experienced attorneys.
As a matter of sheer numbers, it’s likely that the pickings among the mentally retarded bar would be pretty slim. We’ve encountered lawyers who are not very bright, but none who was actually retarded (and the two are not at all the same thing).
Manifesting itself as depression, substance abuse or other impairments, mental illness seems to be more of an issue with our profession than retardation. Our non-medical-professional opinion is that an awful lot of lawyers suffer from what looks like Tourette’s Syndrome The coprolalia part, anyway.
