The Green-Eyed Jury

There must have been a quiet coup in the world of social etiquette while I wasn’t looking, a memo I never received that demoted discretion and crowned raw, unvarnished jealousy as the new vogue. I was raised on the principle that if one felt the sting of envy, one had the good grace to conceal it. But the fashion, it seems, has changed. Consider the case of Caitlin Clark, a comet in the WNBA, the sole player responsible for its newfound cultural gravity. Her own peers, the very players who share the court with her, voted her a distant 9^th among guards, a quiet act of collective sabotage disguised as a ballot. This, while nearly 1.3 million fans declared her their favorite. It’s a curious phenomenon, and one I’ve recently had cause to study up close.

In fact, I am beginning to see it as a key feature of the national character. There is a particular American genius for perfecting the supportive smile while simultaneously calculating the precise trajectory for a well-aimed stone. With Clark, this manifests as players fouling her a little harder, then giving interviews diminishing her achievements, insisting the tidal wave of new fans is for everyone, not just her. You see this impulse everywhere. A UFC fighter named Sean Strickland — the one whose notoriously fraught paternal bond is a fixture of his public persona — recently offered a delightful piece of patriotic sophistry, claiming that foreign champions only exist in his sport because the real money — and thus the real American athletes — is in the NFL. Then there was the theater of grievance at the U.S. Open, where Serena Williams, upon losing to Naomi Osaka, turned her ire on the referee, played the woman card, and inspired a stadium-wide chorus of indignation against her opponent. Had such a display occurred in any other nation, it would have been branded for what it was: a chilling outburst of mass xenophobia. Here, it was merely passion. And this brings me to my own little drama.

Diary entry, March 22, 2025

I was enrolled in a class called Corporate Reorganization, a subject whose title promises all the swashbuckling adventure of alphabetizing a library. It was taught by a jurisprudential wunderkind, a young female partner at a prestigious Chicago firm who, I was reminded, was nearly my age. This was a fact my advisor helpfully pointed out, which I took as his way of suggesting that some people my age were already so much further ahead in life. The class structure was a kind of legal LARPing: we would argue hypothetical cases and then be tasked with writing both the majority and dissenting opinions. My advisor once praised this format as “great for developing litigation skills.” He said this while looking me directly in the eyes, before a brief, flickering moment of cognitive dissonance crossed his face as he presumably recalled my C.V. He quickly amended, “...skills which, of course, you already possess.” “Yeah, after my 400 litigations,” I thought. A masterful recovery.

Within the classroom, a fascinating principle governed our discussions: the doctrine of judicial inertia. The American art of disagreement, I’ve learned, is to first agree with everything that has just been said, before adding that you would merely like to offer a “unique perspective.” We sat in a circle, and the outcome of each case was almost wholly dependent on the starting point of the vote. The professor, a shrewd conductor of this quiet orchestra of conformity, would point a finger, and whichever way the first opinion tilted, the rest would follow in a slow, inexorable cascade — a jurisprudential waterfall flowing obediently in one direction. She was clever, often starting with students she suspected were unprepared, denying them the safety of group consensus. This pattern held firm in our email chains. It was unheard of for a student to change their vote after the fact; the custom was to praise the written arguments of both sides and then reaffirm one’s original position, perhaps with a minor clarifying remark.

Then came my turn to present. The topic was the practice of cross-collateralization in American bankruptcy law. I had excavated its history, tracing its lineage from the Gilded Age railroad reorganizations — a time when bankruptcy was less a judicial process than a managed restructuring by arbiters — to the modern era, where Congress seemed to have meticulously avoided either banning or blessing the practice. I argued that this controversial tool, which allowed debtors to grant superior liens to new lenders post-insolvency, was not the anathema to the Bankruptcy Code that it was often painted to be. I constructed an argument that was, if I may be so bold, hermetically sealed against critique. And it was perhaps this well-structured analysis that so profoundly disturbed the intellectual ecosystem of the classroom.

The response was a masterwork of deflection. Unable to assail the fortress of the argument, they laid siege to its wallpaper. The first volley of complaints concerned my choice of font. Courier, they lamented, was an affront to their delicate sensibilities. It was a “statement,” they said, that made the text “difficult to read.” This, in an age where changing a word document’s font requires less effort than a sigh.

But the true spectacle unfolded in the email chain. What followed was a marvel of synchronized intellectual capitulation. One by one, in a stunning display of spontaneous, identical revelation, my classmates declared that upon “further review” of the opinions, they had all undergone a profound change of heart and would be reversing their votes. All of them. Not a few, not a majority, but every single American student. The lone dissenter in this newfound church of opposition was a student from the UK, who had apparently missed the divine signal. In what I can only describe as an act of startling petulance, they flipped their votes against me. The numbers told the story with chilling precision: of all votes cast that semester, less than 8% were ever changed, and a staggering 67% of those rare reversals were concentrated in my specific case.

It was a masterclass, not in corporate law, but in the mechanics of social preservation. A lesson in how a group, faced with an inconvenient position, will opt not to challenge it, but to unanimously declare that the font it’s written in is simply unreadable. For my own part, should I ever be so consumed by that particular green-eyed monster, I pray I’ll have the decency to craft a more elegant lie. Let it be said that I recount this affair only to indulge my narcissism, for what else is there? It was I, after all, who became the focal point of such orchestrated animosity; my name the subject of their unified scorn. One must conclude I have achieved something of merit. Mediocrity is afforded the mercy of being ignored, a fate I had no intention of accepting. Was my presentation provocative? Of course. Their elaborate hostility wasn't their conspiracy, but the precise, engineered reaction I sought. That was always the true victory.