In Defense of Harvey Weinstein’s Harvard Lawyer
The law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is among the most accomplished people at Harvard. He has helped to overturn scores of wrongful convictions and to free thousands from wrongful incarceration. A sought-after defense attorney and the director of Harvard’s criminal-law clinic, he became the first African American in the institution’s history to be appointed as a faculty dean, a pastoral role that includes residing at Winthrop House among its undergraduates. But a vocal faction of students now want to force his resignation, an escalating controversy covered most thoroughly in The Harvard Crimson.
According to the Crimson, vandals spray-painted the doors of Winthrop House this week with Down w Sullivan!, Our Rage is Self Defense, Whose Side Are You On?, and Your Silence is Violence. An online petition has circulated among those who want to end his role in residential life. Protesters assembled on campus to publicly show their displeasure. And Harvard administrators launched a “climate review” among the undergraduates in his charge, invoking procedures for “when climate concerns arise in a faculty-led unit.”
Sullivan faces this “clamor of popular suspicions and prejudices” because he agreed to act as a criminal-defense attorney for an object of scorn and hatred: Harvey Weinstein.
His detractors should know that by undertaking to represent such a client, Sullivan is participating in a tradition older than the nation itself. The British soldiers who opened fire on a crowd of Bostonians in 1770, killing five, were among the most reviled men in the 13 colonies. Harvard alumnus John Adams, a patriot with aspirations for political office, agreed to defend them at trial, even though he knew that he was risking not only his reputation, but the safety of his family, because aggrieved Bostonians felt that their safety was implicated.
“In the Evening I expressed to Mrs. Adams all my
