Campaigns to manufacture outrage have long been popular, but we’re starting to see them ramp up targeting law schools. Stephen Miller earned a couple minutes of fame for suing on behalf of hypothetical white males discriminated against by NYU’s Law Review. But this isn’t just an east coast anti-diversity campaign — Northwestern was recently hit with a suit alleging that their hiring practices discriminate against white applicants. Much of their complaint falls apart upon inspection. From Diverse Education:
Since the plaintiffs decided to make the “high-demand, low-supply field” of tax law an example, I’d like to acknowledge one undeniably true statement: there are very few minority tax law professors. That is particularly obvious at the sort of elite institutions the suit emphasizes. Neither Stanford nor the University of Chicago have any. Northwestern has one among its nine residential tax faculty.
Northwestern’s residing tax faculty is ~89% white and that’s still worth suing over? Being mad at 1/9th of your faculty being a minority looks less like an attempt to enforce the 14th Amendment and more like trying to legally bring back the one drop rule. Is the claim really that hiring one non-white person makes the entire group diverse? For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like the plaintiffs are expecting a good faith engagement with their theory of the case — their examples don’t even cut in their favor.
Inevitably, the document pairs its lonely truth with an almost laughable falsehood, stating that tax law scholars who are female are “difficult or impossible to find.” There are, in fact, lots of women tax law professors. The complaint fails to mention that one of the targets of the lawsuit is a woman tax law professor.
The fact about the rarity of non-white tax law professors is offered as a smoking gun, proof of anti-white male bias in law school hiring. Precisely the opposite is true. That virtually every tax law professor (and tax lawyer) is white highlights a pervasive bias that continues to produce tax policies that harm Black taxpayers.
The author goes on to write that tax law professors are likely to diversify over time, but he attributes the coming change to them being undervalued and cheaper to hire rather than affirmative action or an anti-white male bias. Either way, this isn’t the last great white hope lawsuit against universities that we’ll see. Hopefully they do a better job of making coherent arguments next time.
The Law School Hiring Market Undervalues Women, Minorities [Diverse Education]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
