The College Fix

OPINION: Merit-based hiring shouldn’t be notable, it should be the norm.

It’s encouraging to see when professors push back against the prevailing notion of identity politics.

One such instance occurred in an exchange between two law professors over the weekend on The Faculty Lounge, a blog run by about a dozen law professors from various U.S. universities. The “issue” was the number of female speakers at the George Mason Law Review’s Fall 2025 Symposium, sponsored by the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

In a post Friday, Pace University law Professor Bridget Crawford (pictured left) questioned why the list of “leading scholars” chosen to participate in the event included so few women.

Of the 14 speakers, only “one (7.1%) is a woman” and she “shares a speaking slot,” Crawford, a regular contributor to the blog, wrote.

What’s more, a 2024 conference at George Mason, sponsored by the same organization, included only three women on the 12-member panel, she wrote.

“We can do better,” Crawford insisted, while implying that she herself, a member of the ACTEC, could have been one of the speakers.

Crawford did not explain what she meant by “better.” Would 50 percent female be adequate? Or perhaps 75 percent, as a way to help “rectify” past inequities?

The female scholar did blame one person by name: symposium organizer and George Mason law Professor Thomas Gallanis (pictured right).

However, according to Gallanis, she never contacted him to ask about the situation. And she closed the comments section under her post so he could not respond.

So, he wrote his own guest post Sunday on the blog to defend his actions.

“… I made efforts to encourage a broad range of potential speakers, including women speakers, to submit abstracts for these events,” he wrote. “In addition to posting calls for papers on AALS Section listservs, I tried to think of a broad range of potential speakers and sent them emails encouraging them to submit an abstract.”

Notably, he said Crawford did not submit anything herself – even though she is on the lists where he sent the announcement. And only a few other female scholars did.

“Not that it matters, but if my records are correct, I accepted 100 percent (3 of 3) of the abstracts submitted by women professors for the 2024 event and 50 percent (1 of 2) of the abstracts submitted by women professors for the 2025 event. Professor Crawford could have learned these data if she had spoken with me,” he wrote.

Gallanis recognized that characteristics like race and sex do drive decisions in some law schools today, writing:

“I have heard (and seen) that some law faculty hiring committees take note of an individual applicant’s sex or race in deciding whether to invite that applicant for an interview. These committees evaluate an individual applicant better or worse on the basis of a protected characteristic in order to achieve a slate of interviewees that the committee deems sufficiently diverse. I do not know whether Professor Crawford encourages her law school’s hiring committee to do this, but from her blog post I am guessing that the answer is in the affirmative. My view is that this is illegal.”

His own method is based on merit.

“ … I judge each abstract on its individual merit, not on the protected characteristics of the author,” Gallanis wrote. “I will not put a thumb on the scale in favor of or against any individual based on the individual’s protected characteristics in order to curate a panel or a conference with some percentage of this or that protected demographic.”

The problem is that Gallanis’s merit-based method is notable. It shouldn’t be, it should be the norm. Meanwhile, critiques like Crawford’s are commonly accepted at face value.

Their exchange is another indicator that, despite a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the matter, a person’s sex or the color of their skin still play too large a role today in the determination of an individual’s value in academia.

MORE: Test scores only: University of Austin debuts ‘merit-first admissions’ policy

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Pace University law Professor Bridget Crawford and George Mason law Professor Thomas Gallanis. Pace University, George Mason University

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