"My decision to accept an offer in Big Law was not driven by any allegiance to corporations or any Machiavellian analysis of whether it would be a springboard for future political ambitions."

"... Instead, it was a matter of practicality. To have enough money to pay off my student loan debt, which totaled more than $100,000 after three years of legal education, and send money home to support family members, I needed the six-figure salary that my firm was offering. Big Law offered an opportunity to earn enough money to lift myself, and by extension my family, out of poverty and into the middle class.... Many attorneys of color are in the same position...."

Writes Erika Stallings in WaPo, responding to "No More Corporate Lawyers on the Federal Bench/The next Democratic president should try nominating judges who haven’t been partners at big law firms" by Brian Fallon and Christopher Kang, founders of something called Demand Justice (in The Atlantic). Fallon was an aide to Chuck Schumer, and Kang was an aide to Dick Durbin.

As Stallings puts it, Demand Justice "believes that the number of judges with ['Big Law'] experiences creates an 'insular, back-scratching network of legal elites who work together to promote corporate interests.' But not everyone who works at a corporate law firm is the same. And in trying to purge corporate influence from the judiciary, Demand Justice risks making the ranks of judges more homogenous in another way: namely, whiter and richer."

From Fallon and Kang:

[O]ur point is not that corporate lawyers are incapable of becoming fair-minded judges. A judge’s legal background is not inherently predictive of how she will rule. Sotomayor herself is proof of that... Our point, rather, is that the federal bench is already filled with enough corporate lawyers, and that the law is being skewed in favor of corporations, giving them astonishing power. And for all the examples of progressive judges who spent time in Big Law, there are many more brilliant legal minds whose backgrounds too often, perversely, prevented their consideration for the bench. There are plenty enough highly qualified individuals with other backgrounds—civil-rights litigators, public defenders, and legal-aid lawyers—that the next president can afford to make identifying new types of candidates a priority.

In the coming weeks, Demand Justice will propose a list of potential judicial selections whom the next Democratic president should consider. We are confident that the exercise will prove there is no shortage of qualified picks who have chosen paths in public-interest work, labor law, academia, or other fields that deserve to be represented on the federal bench....

Democrats... must stock the federal judiciary with judges who have a more diverse array of experiences, who can help their colleagues more fully understand the competing perspectives on the law that come before them.

This is an interesting conflict. Stallings stresses the importance of racial and class diversity, things law schools take into account at the point of admission, and Fallon and Kang stress diversity in post-law-school experience. Stallings looks at the problem from the point of view of the career-seeking lawyer, and Fallon and Kang are talking about the way cases are decided.