Top journal told editors to “use your best efforts” to avoid citing white men
The Michigan Law Review selects student editors based on race and gender. It discriminates against white authors in favor of women and minorities. And it tells editors to avoid citing white men whenever possible—instructing them to “use your best efforts to locate a source that gives voice to historically marginalized identities.”
Those are some of the allegations in a lawsuit filed this week against the University of Michigan and its flagship law review. Represented by former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, the plaintiffs include three scholars who have submitted manuscripts to the law review as well as a student who applied to be an editor.
The complaint alleges that the journal uses “race and sex preferences to select its members and articles” in violation of federal law. It also includes internal documents that shed light on the journal’s diversity policies, such as a production manual from the journal’s most recent volume.
“MLR prefers to cite authors who are traditionally underrepresented in legal academia,” the manual reads. “When suggesting a source, please use your best efforts to locate a source that gives voice to historically marginalized identities.”
In an “About Us” page posted on the law review’s website, the journal adds that it “seeks to elevate a diversity of viewpoints, ideas, and identities and to amplify historically marginalized voices.”
The complaint against Michigan comes as three federal agencies are investigating similar practices at the Harvard Law Review, which screens out more than 85 percent of submissions using a race-conscious rubric, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The flurry of legal actions suggests that student-run law journals could become a serious liability for universities as the Trump administration continues its scorched-earth campaign against racial preferences, forcing schools to take a closer look at publications that have historically operated without much oversight.
Mitchell, who has also vowed to sue the Harvard Law Review, described the complaint against Michigan as “the first of many” and said he plans to target the top 20 law journals. He has already sent legal holds to many of those journals, instructing them to preserve documents that could be subpoenaed in the course of litigation, including the “personal statements” used to select editors.
“The law reviews have a choice,” Mitchell told the Free Beacon. “They can get rid of their illegal race and sex preferences, or they can be sued.”
A spokeswoman for the University of Michigan, Michelle Rodgers, said that the university “remains steadfast in its commitment to following the law” and would “vigorously defend against these allegations.”
The complaint, filed on Wednesday in federal court, alleges that the Michigan Law Review awards “illegal and discriminatory preferences” through the “holistic review committee” that grades applicants’ personal statements. Applicants who indicate that they are a “minority, homosexual, or transgender” earn “higher scores on the personal statement than they would have received had they chosen not to flag these demographic characteristics,” the complaint states. “Applicants from these preferred demographics are also awarded positions on the Law Review over heterosexual and non-transgender white men who have better grades and better scores on the components of the Law Review’s writing competition.”
Like the Harvard Law Review, the Michigan Law Review does not disclose the identities of students who serve on its holistic review committee. But according to the complaint, the committee excludes editors who express opposition to racial preferences.
“Students who are believed to be conservative or members of organizations such as the Federalist Society are never chosen to serve on the Holistic Review Committee and are never chosen for editorial positions that entail a place on the Holistic Review Committee,” the lawsuit claims, “because these students would resist or expose the Law Review’s use of illegal race and sex preferences when selecting student members.”
The plaintiffs are part of Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP), a group that is currently suing the Northwestern Law Review for alleged race discrimination. In one of that journal’s recent issues, every scholar published was a black woman.
The issue “does not disclose that only articles written by black women were considered for publication, making it appear as though the normal selection process was used and that these authors earned their placement in the Northwestern University Law Review by writing better scholarship than the articles that were rejected,” FASORP’s complaint alleges. “The student editors and members on the Law Review were told that this was done intentionally to promote the careers of these black women academics because of their race and sex.”
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