But it is not just that these law students are arguing for an unreasonable meaning of Shapiro’s words; they are claiming to be so personally traumatized by those words that they need a special room to go cry in. That is not just dishonest, it is insane. Real lawyers need a much thicker skin than that when confronting unpleasant words and alien points of view. They need the ability to read and fairly digest the words of people with drastically different perspectives than their own. They also need the capacity to stretch their own minds to persuade other people — judges, juries, the other side in a negotiation — who may come from different perspectives and see things differently. Like it or not, judges from Federalist Society backgrounds and perspectives are going to be in a lot of courtrooms; Trump voters are going to be on a lot of juries. If you are wholly incapable of reading things in anything but the most bizarrely uncharitable left-wing way (here, the preposterous claim that Shapiro was somehow describing all black women as “lesser”) and you then take that one meaning so personally that you need a designated crying area . . . well, that’s not a frame of mind that is designed for the rough-and-tumble of lawyering…

One way of reading this stuff is to take the law students literally. If they are taken literally, these law students are just far too emotionally fragile for the practice of law. Law is a hard business. Even if one avoids the toxic workplace cultures that are all too common in the law, lawyers in almost any field face long working hours, intense time pressures, high stakes, and demanding clients. Some areas of the law are especially emotionally draining: Prosecutors must deal with victims of traumatic crimes, criminal-defense lawyers must handle people facing long jail sentences, family lawyers are constantly in the midst of divorces and custody fights. Many areas of the law involve daily exposure to people the lawyer has no power to control and who can make your life hell: clients, judges, opposing counsel, witnesses, regulatory agencies, even people on your own side. I spent two decades practicing one of the more comparatively courtly areas of law (mainly securities class actions) in a generally collegial workplace, and I’ve still seen all sorts of hard things — all-nighters, abusive opposing counsel, snide judges, a client in tears at his acquittal by a jury, a pro bono client being deported, a conference call where one of our clients was browbeating some of our other clients. Every lawyer has stories, and in the moment, you need to keep some measure of an even keel. If you can’t take the heat, you’re in the wrong business. Trial lawyers don’t get to ask the judge to stop a trial so they can go cry.