Northwestern Law School Is Accused of Discriminating Against White Males In Hiring Process
Jose Nino
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According to a lawsuit filed by the America First Legal Foundation, Northwestern University’s law school made a concerted effort to avoid hiring well-qualified white male legal scholars as part of an anti-white diversity effort.
The lawsuit contends that these affirmative action policies violate federal anti-discrimination laws.
The lawsuit filed on July 2, 2024 was a 32-page complaint accusing faculty hiring policies at US universities of being “a cesspool of corruption and lawlessness.” It singled out Northwestern for being a prime example of this behavior.
The lawsuit contends 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 highlights that “superstar academics” such as Eugene Volokh have had employment opportunities turned down “in favor of candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records.”
The lawsuit noted that Volokh is 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.”
“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 added.
That said, the Northwest faculty hiring committee did not interview Volokh when he manifested interest in a job position back in the 2022-23 academic year.
Curiously, Volokh was supported by many members of the Northwestern law school faculty according to the lawsuit.
In email correspondence with The College Fix, Volokh confirmed the hiring ordeal, but added he was not aware of the discriminatory practice taking place.
“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 declared.
“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 continued, calling attention to how he’s retired from teaching full-time. He is currently 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 stated.
The plaintiffs in this case are Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences. This organization exists “for the purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia and fighting race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations,” the lawsuit highlighted.
Three unnamed white, male legal scholars are plaintiffs in this case, declaring they would submit applications to Northwestern law school but alleged that its discriminatory hiring practices prevented them from going through with this move.
The lawsuit also claims that on top of Volokh, multiple white men who possessed significantly more academic credentials were rejected positions at the law school in favor of non-white minorities who were much less qualified.
The lawsuit highlighted how Northwestern hired two black female scholars despite their lack qualifications and eventually failed to fulfill their roles and no longer teach at the university.
The lawsuit also claimed that faculty were instructed in one case to vote for a black female scholar with the threat of lowering their annual bonuses.
This anti-white 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 asserted.
“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 continued.
It highlighted the case of a female black scholar with a mediocre academic record who in 2022 was enticed to join the university with a $900,000 budget to establish 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,” the lawsuit noted, claiming that the black female “was hired over white male candidates who are vastly more capable and qualified than she is.”
The center has only hosted two events since it was launched, one of them being the inaugural event.
“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 claimed.
Furthermore, the lawsuit claims the Northwestern University Law Review, the university’s leading scholarly journal, carries out discriminatory actions.
“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 contended.
“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.”
Universities, private or public, are very much engaging in anti-white policies. This is the ethos that has captured countless institutions nationwide. Lawsuits are a natural response to this kind of misbehavior.
However, a long-term solution would be for right-wing administrations to use rational forms of state power to punish these universities for their anti-white behavior.
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