Northwestern University’s law school deliberately avoided hiring highly qualified white male legal scholars in an effort to develop a more diverse faculty makeup in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws, alleges a lawsuit recently filed by a prominent conservative legal group.
America First Legal Foundation filed the 32-page complaint July 2, alleging faculty hiring at U.S. universities “is a cesspool of corruption and lawlessness,” and arguing Northwestern is a prime example.
It alleges that for the last 12 years, the leadership of Northwestern law “has propagated and enforced a mandate to hire as many non-white and non-male faculty candidates as possible.”
The lawsuit points out even “superstar academics” like Eugene Volokh have been rejected “in favor of candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records.”
Volokh, a white male, “is a prolific and internationally renowned legal scholar whose academic works, especially on the First Amendment, are often cited by litigants, courts, and scholars,” the lawsuit states.
“He served as a law professor at UCLA for 30 years. He is a member of the American Law Institute, a co-founder of one of the most popular legal blogs in the world, and his work has been repeatedly cited by the Supreme Court of the United States. He is also a former law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,” it states.
Yet the Northwestern faculty hiring committee didn’t even give Volokh an interview when he expressed interest in a job there during the 2022-23 academic year, even though he was supported by many of Northwestern’s law faculty, it states.
Volokh, in an email Sunday to The College Fix, confirmed the matter, but added he is unaware of whether discrimination played a role.
“Some people at Northwestern and I did talk about the possibility of my moving over there from UCLA, and nothing ended up coming of it. But that ends up happening often in such situations, for a wide range of reasons, and I don’t know exactly what the actual reasons here were,” he said.
“Nor do I personally care – I am very happy in my new full-time research position as a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford,” he added, noting he’s retired from full-time teaching and is now professor emeritus at UCLA.
“It will be interesting to see what, if anything, this lawsuit uncovers. But on that I’ll be a spectator just like everyone else,” Volokh said.
Northwestern University and America First Legal have yet to respond to The College Fix seeking comment on the complaint.
A spokesman for Northwestern University said the institution is “proud” of the law school and intends to defend against the allegations.
“Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is among the top law schools in the country, and we are proud of their outstanding faculty,” Northwestern University spokesperson Jon Yates said in a statement to ABC News. “We intend to vigorously defend this case.”
The plaintiffs are Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences, an organization formed “for the purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia and fighting race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations,” the suit states.
Three unnamed white, male legal scholars are serving as plaintiffs, stating they would apply to Northwestern law school but for its alleged discriminatory hiring practices.
The lawsuit paints a picture with detailed charts how only three of 21 job offers at Northwestern’s law school over the past three hiring cycles have been extended to white men.
Two of the three male legal scholars given offers to were also in the high-demand, low-supply field of tax law, which has a dearth of women and scholars of color as experts, it states.
The suit also alleges that in addition to Volokh, several white men who were significantly more academically credentialed were denied positions at the law school in favor of minorities with fewer credentials, citing multiple examples.
The lawsuit describes how two black female scholars were hired by Northwestern despite their sparse qualifications and eventually failed to live up to expectations and no longer teach there.
The lawsuit also alleges faculty were told in one instance to vote for a black female scholar with the threat of diminishing their annual bonuses hanging over their heads.
The no-white-males hiring mandate “directs Northwestern Law School to intentionally and consciously discriminate in favor of black, Hispanic, Asian, female, homosexual, and transgender faculty candidates, and against white men who are heterosexual and non-transgender,” the lawsuit alleges.
“Candidates with preferred identities are awarded substantial advantages and chosen over white men who have vastly superior publication records and far more impressive educational and professional credentials,” the lawsuit states.
It points to the example of a female black scholar with a mediocre scholarly record who in 2022 was lured to the school with a $900,000 budget to start a Center for Racial and Disability Justice.
“No other faculty hire in the recent history of Northwestern Law School has ever received a budget of this sort. Northwestern Law School has far more accomplished scholars … on its faculty, and none of them have ever been offered a $900,000 center to run,” it states, alleging the black female “was hired over white male candidates who are vastly more capable and qualified than she is.”
Yet in the time since, the center has only hosted two events, one of which was the launch.
“In two years, [the] $900,000 center has made no contributions whatsoever to academic life at Northwestern University. Yet Northwestern continues to waste money on this useless center to pander to an affirmative action hire who never deserved her appointment in the first place,” the lawsuit alleges.
The suit also alleges the Northwestern University Law Review, the institution’s preeminent scholarly journal, is engaged in discrimination.
“The student editors of the Northwestern University Law Review give discriminatory preferences to women, racial minorities, homosexuals, and transgender people when selecting their members and editors—a practice that violates the unequivocal commands of Title VI and Title IX,” it argues.
“The student editors of the Northwestern University Law Review also give discriminatory preferences to articles written by women, racial minorities, homosexuals, or transgender people, while rejecting far better articles written by white men.”
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