Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon documents more bad news for the Harvard Law Review.
When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.
The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.”
“The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication,” the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.
But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about “author diversity.” And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that “we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.”
“We shouldn’t be checking a box,” the editor added. “Just something to be mindful of.”
The exchange took place on March 13—months after the Trump administration had ordered schools to end racial preferences—and was chronicled in meeting minutes from the law review’s articles committee, a 10-person body that screens out the vast majority of submissions. Zhang’s piece was voted down narrowly.
The law review has said that it vets articles based solely on “their quality and contribution to legal scholarship.” But in at least 87 cases identified by the Free Beacon—including 75 from the volume published last year alone—the journal considered protected traits or encouraged its members to do so.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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