Accountability Through the Justice System: Daniel Kramer and Karen Dunn of Paul Weiss on Combating Hate
Daniel Kramer and Karen Dunn of Paul Weiss, finalists for The American Lawyer's 2024 Attorney of the Year honor, discuss their "role in the effort to address hate."
November 12, 2024 at 12:41 PM
3 minute read
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partners Daniel Kramer and Karen Dunn operate busy litigation practices, but the work they are passionate about goes beyond what they do for paying clients.
Dunn and Kramer earlier this year created the Center to Combat Hate, with the mission to "bring impact litigation to confront and redress hate-driven violence and intimidation."
"Through partnerships with civil rights organizations and educational institutions, as well as through independent litigation, the Center fights to safeguard vulnerable communities and groups and foster a more just and equitable society," states its mission statement.
For their work, they are finalists for The American Lawyer's 2024 Attorney of the Year honor.
Dunn, who is co-chair of Paul Weiss' litigation department, said the center seeks to use the courts to fight hate-driven intimidation and violence, which she said "is experiencing, in our country, a historic uptick."
It also seeks to make anti-hate efforts more visible to the public, in that "a very well-thought-out civil justice system is a tool and a bulwark against people" who encourage "what has now become a standard of racially motivated violence."
"We have received an incredible outpouring of support from our clients," she said. "We’re living in a time when I think it’s not controversial to be anti-hate."
Kramer's past involvement has included leading the firm's successful 2022 representation of Metropolitan AME Church's lawsuit against the far-right Proud Boys after its members leapt over a fence surrounding the church, and tore down and destroyed a large Black Lives Matter sign the church was displaying.
He said the center uses the two litigators' "expertise in bringing lawsuits" to achieve its goals.
"That's our role in the effort to address hate," Kramer said. "Our goal is to hold violent extremists accountable for their actions and to dissuade those who might think of walking down the same path."
He noted few major law firms "do this kind of work" in the same way as Paul Weiss, an Am Law 50 firm with upward of 1,000 lawyers and more than $2 billion in annual revenue.
"We’re hoping that people who are taking violent, hateful actions will think twice if they know that there's a major law firm that's devoted to bringing these cases and holding them accountable," Kramer said.
The Center to Combat Hate, they said, continues the firm's long history of socially conscious pro bono work. Paul Weiss is known for such work as a successful appeal overturning the death penalty conviction of the Scottsboro Boys—nine Black teens who had been accused of raping two white women in 1931 in Alabama. The firm also assisted Thurgood Marshall in overturning the doctrine of "separate but equal" in public education in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
And Dunn was the lead lawyer for Paul Weiss when it helped win a groundbreaking verdict in the Sines v. Kessler case tried in Virginia federal court in 2021 against white supremacist groups engaging in conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence in Charlottesville in 2017.
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