Foley Pulls Associate Job Offer Over Israel-Palestine Comments

Foley & Lardner rescinded an employment offer for an incoming associate over public comments she made following the Hamas attack on Israel, the law firm said Thursday.

The Milwaukee-founded firm pulled the offer for Jinan Chehade, a 2023 Georgetown Law School graduate, just before her intended October start date, a Foley spokesperson said, citing “public statements that were inconsistent with our core values.” Following “a discussion with Ms. Chehade, we made the decision to rescind her offer of employment,” the firm spokesperson said.

An earlier version of the firm’s statement said that Chehade made public statements “condoning the horrendous attacks by Hamas.” Foley did not identify the public statements it found problematic.

The decision has prompted legal action from Chehade, who on Nov. 13 filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She’s accusing the firm of illegal retaliation and discrimination on the basis of her nationality and religion, her lawyer Rima Kapitan said in a phone interview Thursday.

Kapitan said Chehade also plans to file a lawsuit in federal court in Chicago, where Chehade was to start her job at Foley. Senior members of the firm “interrogated” Chehade over her social media posts before pulling her offer the day before her Oct. 23 start date, the EEOC charge claims.

“They took her media posts as evidence that she supported violence, even though she said her concern was freedom for Palestinians,” said Kapitan. “There are other attorneys at Foley who support Israel. Presumably none of those attorneys were called into an interrogation or fired for their political beliefs.”

Chehade first revealed Foley’s termination in an interview that aired Thursday with the news program Democracy Now, where she claimed Foley framed her advocacy for Palestine as “supporting terrorism.” She also claimed that she was singled out “as one of the only visibly Arab Muslim women associates in the law firm nationwide.”

Chehade claimed in the EEOC charge that her social media posts “pointed out that the October 7 attack needs to be contextualized in light of 75 years of ethnic cleansing and apartheid,” but that she never supported targeting of civilians by either side.

Chehade could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.

Flashpoint

Chehade worked as a summer associate at Foley in 2022 before her final year of law school, according to her LinkedIn profile. She is part of a growing list of people who have had job offers revoked by corporate law firms over comments about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Winston & Strawn in October scrapped a job offer for a New York University law student who, following the Hamas attack, issued a statement saying they “will not condemn Palestinian resistance.” Davis Polk & Wardwell also revoked job offers to three students at Harvard and Columbia universities who were leaders of groups that signed onto statements holding Israel responsible for the attack.

The violence in the region has become a flashpoint across both law firms and law schools,contributing to a larger debate about free speech and firings over controversial comments.

“The question is where is the line drawn and keeping in mind that when law firms do this, it does have an effect on chilling speech,” UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in an interview in early November. “Maybe it’s speech that should be chilled, but the question is when we should want that effect.”

A group of law firm leaders also sent a letter Nov. 13 to several law school deans urging them to confront the growing instances of antisemitism on college campuses. More than 200 law firms signed the letter, which told deans to take an “unequivocal stance” against antisemitic harassment on their campuses.

The letter engendered criticism from a coalition of Muslim American lawyer groups over its failure to account for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim populations. In a Nov. 14 letter, the groups argued that firms were issuing “one-sided support for Israel.”

“Some firms’ uneven treatment of this highly sensitive issue is sadly dehumanizing Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim lives, creating a workplace that is less inclusive, less welcoming, and more hostile toward these underrepresented groups,” the groups wrote.

Sidley Austin reportedly fired an associate who published an essay on the website Medium criticizing the law firms for conflating antisemitism with the “geo-political question of Israel’s legitimacy.” The firm dismissed the associate after she refused to take the post down, according to The American Lawyer.