David Lat (Judicial Notice) writes, and I agree with him (at least assuming, as press accounts suggest, that Kiros was indeed fired for the viewpoint expressed in her open letter):
Another associate has lost their job because of a controversial statement about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Meet Melat Kiros, a 2022 graduate of Notre Dame Law and, until recently, a securities regulatory and enforcement associate in the New York office of Sidley Austin. She published an open letter on Medium responding to—and criticizing—an open letter signed by 200+ law firms, in which the firms urged law school deans to crack down on antisemitism on their campuses. While she condemned antisemitism, she argued against "conflat[ing] such bigotry with the geopolitical question of Israel's legitimacy." Kiros's letter went viral, she was asked to take it down, and after she refused, she was fired.
I'm going to be honest: I have concerns about Kiros's firing. Unlike some pro-Palestine statements, Kiros's cannot be reasonably read as supporting the October 7 attack specifically or terrorism more generally, since it explicitly declares that "[t]here is no justification for the attacks on Israel on October 7th." It just happens to be a very pro-Palestine letter that advocates a single-state solution, a secular nation "where all citizens are equal under the rule of law, regardless of religion or ethnicity."
I disagree strongly with most of Kiros's letter. For starters, I favor a two-state solution, including an Israel that is explicitly a Jewish state. But I don't consider her views to be outside the so-called "Overton window," and while I acknowledge Sidley's legal right to fire her, I'd prefer to live in a world where employers tolerate a wide range of views on controversial issues. As Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently told me, "Does [a law firm] have the right to hire or fire whomever they want? Yes. And can they base it on things including their speech? Yes. But our goal is to get people to at least consider, in a way that we used to be better at as a society, old ideas like everyone's entitled to their opinion."
