A conservative group filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University’s law school on Tuesday, arguing that its efforts to hire more women and people of color as faculty members violate federal laws that prohibit discrimination against race and gender.
The complaint, which comes a little more than a year after the Supreme Court struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, is expected to be among the first in a wave of new legal challenges attacking the way American universities hire and promote faculty. .
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Chicago, calls the process a “cesspool of corruption and lawlessness.” He says Northwestern has deliberately sidelined white male applicants for law school professorships, giving preference to candidates of other race and gender identity.
Jon Yates, a spokesman for Northwestern, said the university will defend its hiring practices in court. “Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is among the top law schools in the country, and we are proud of their outstanding faculty,” he said in a statement.
The complaint, filed by a group calling itself Faculty, Alumni and Students Opposing Racial Preference, named several candidates for teaching positions at Northwestern, including well-known legal scholars who it said were denied interviews or prevented from advancing.
Of the 21 job offers made by the law school over the past three years, three went to white men, the suit says.
“For decades, left-leaning faculty and administrators have flouted federal anti-discrimination laws and openly discriminated based on race and gender when hiring faculty,” the complaint states. “They do this by hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching skills.”
At least two of the white male scholars named in the complaint told The New York Times that they were not involved in the lawsuit and had no hard feelings about not getting a job at Northwestern.
In the complaint, the group describes itself as a nonprofit membership organization “created for the purpose of restoring meritocracy to academia.”
Its membership is not disclosed in the lawsuit, but the group’s sweeping approach suggests it wants to position itself explicitly as a successor to Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that sued universities on behalf of Asian-American students who said they were discriminated against when applying to colleges. A year ago, these complaints led the Supreme Court to ban affirmative action in college admissions.
The complaint is notable for its scathing attack on what it calls “leftist ideologues on faculty appointment committees and university PPC offices” and for its partisan tone. The plaintiffs’ lead attorney, Jonathan F. Mitchell, is a former Texas attorney general turned conservative activist judge.
Mr. Mitchell was the architect of SB 8, the Texas law passed in 2021 that effectively banned most abortions. He also defended the right of former President Donald J. Trump to appear in the Colorado presidential election as a candidate this year, which he won after an appeal to the Supreme Court.
“We’re just getting started,” Mr Mitchell said in a statement on Tuesday. “Any professor who has incriminating evidence should contact us.”
The suit says applicants with “stellar credentials” who were denied positions at Northwestern include Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar and then UCLA law professor and well-known legal blogger. He also mentions Ernest A. Young, professor of constitutional law at Duke University.
A footnote says the professors had nothing to do with initiating the complaint or providing information about it.
Mr. Volokh contacted Northwestern about a job during the 2022-2023 academic year but was not offered an interview, the suit says. “His accomplishments exceed those of almost any professor currently on the faculty of Northwestern Law School,” he adds. “Professor Volokh, however, is a white male and is neither gay nor transgender.”
Mr. Volokh said Tuesday that he did not remember whether he had called Northwestern or whether the law school had called him. But he said that after 30 years of teaching, he had just started a position as a senior fellow at the Hoover Foundation at Stanford and had no hard feelings.
“People get hired or not hired for a variety of reasons,” he said. “I’m a happy camper at this point.”
He added that he knew nothing about Northwestern’s hiring practices. But, he said, “my sense is that elite law schools have long prided themselves on their efforts to diversify what they call the legal academy by engaging in some degree of affirmative action based on race.”
Mr. Young, the Duke professor, said he was a friend of Northwestern’s former law school dean, who had chaired his nominating committee, and detected no animosity.
“I’ve got so many hits against me it’s hard to know which one,” he said. “I’m over 50. I’m white. I am male. I am right of center politically. None of these things are good. And I don’t have a Ph.D. in another industry, which is a big hiring trend. But, you know, I have a job at a very good law school.”
The complaint includes significant details about several faculty hires at Northwestern, apparently based on insider accounts, and includes language that could be construed as racially charged. For a few of the candidates, the suit alleges, they lacked scholarship or understanding of material. It accuses a professor of using a mock exam from a publicly available source because she was “too lazy to write her own exam question.”
At least two of the hires did not receive tenure and are no longer on the law school faculty.
The suit also alleges that there was some horse-trading during the 2019-2020 hiring cycle. He says the dean of the law school cut a deal with Stephen Calabresi, a Northwestern professor who helped found the conservative Federalist Society, to support the hiring of a Federalist Society member in exchange for supporting the nominations of a black professor at the University of Iowa . Paul Gowder and another professor’s wife.
The Fed candidate was a gay white man, so he would pass the rally, the complaint says. But she was ultimately not hired after an associate dean and some of her colleagues objected to hiring a white man, the suit says.
Mr. Gounder, now a professor at Northwestern, said Tuesday that he had “no idea of any kind of deal” but that he had ample credentials for the job. He graduated from Harvard Law School before his 21st birthday and was a civil rights attorney with a law degree and a Ph.D. when he was hired at Iowa. He won a $100,000 grant for his third book, he said, and his resume includes more than 40 publications of various genres.
Mr. Calabresi, the founder of the Federal Corporation, did not respond to requests for comment.
Alain Delaquerière and Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.
