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Northwestern University has convinced a federal judge in Chicago to toss a lawsuit filed against the school alleging it discriminates against white men in its faculty hiring process.
The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Sarah Ellis, an Obama-appointee, who agreed with Northwestern’s argument that the plaintiff organization, Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences, lacked standing because it failed to show its members had actually applied for open positions at the law school, Reuters reported.
“The decision is the latest in a series of court setbacks for conservative legal groups targeting law schools, including unsuccessful discrimination cases against the Harvard Law Review in 2018 and the NYU Law Review in 2023,” the news outlet reported. “FASORP also sued the Michigan Law Review for discrimination in June but voluntarily dismissed the case in October.”
Northwestern University law school, America First Legal Foundation, and FASORP did not respond to The College Fix’s requests for comment.
Despite the loss in court, Northwestern University in December agreed to pay $75 million to resolve a federal anti-discrimination probe. As part of the settlement, the university agreed to end all affirmative action policies.
“Northwestern shall provide that all hiring, promotion, tenure, compensation, and other employment practices for faculty and administrative roles are grounded solely in individual qualifications and academic and professional merit,” the resolution states.
“Northwestern will not use race, color, sex, or national origin as a factor, implicit or explicit, in hiring, promotion, tenure, compensation, and other employment decisions across all schools, departments, and programs.”
The lawsuit began in July of 2024, when FASORP, which describes itself as dedicated to preserving meritocracy and eliminating race and sex preferences in academia, filed the complaint with support from America First Legal Foundation.
In the complaint, the group claimed that a hiring mandate established over a decade ago directs Northwestern’s 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.”
One of the individuals cited in the complaint is Eugene Volokh, a distinguished professor at the UCLA School of Law and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has taught classes on subjects including First Amendment law, criminal law, and firearms regulation policy, and has authored multiple textbooks and more than 100 law review articles.
FASORP argued that during the 2022-23 academic year, Volokh contacted Northwestern and expressed interest in a possible job, receiving support from members of the school faculty.
However, “the appointments committee that year was chaired by former Dean Dan Rodriguez, who repeatedly pushed for race-based hirings as dean and refused to even invite Professor Volokh to interview.”
For this reason, they believe that “Professor Volokh’s candidacy was never even presented to the Northwestern faculty for a vote, while candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records were interviewed and received offers because of their preferred demographic characteristics.”
Professor Volokh declined to comment to The College Fix about the ruling.
When the lawsuit was first filed in 2024, Professor Volokh told The College Fix that “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.”
FASORP had argued that “Numerous professors at Northwestern, including the current Vice Dean Emily Kadens, openly said that Professor Volokh would have been hired at Northwestern had he been anything other than a white man.”
The lawsuit also alleged that Ernest Young, the Alston & Bird Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke Law School, was rejected due to being a white man.
“Many on Northwestern’s faculty wanted to hire Professor Young. But the Rodriguez-chaired appointments committee blocked him and refused to advance his candidacy to the faculty for a vote, despite his stellar credentials and qualifications,” it alleged.
The College Fix contacted Professor Young, but did not receive a response.
While there may be reason to reject these scholars, the plaintiffs claim that the school’s hiring mandate “has led to the hiring of patently unqualified professors” such as a black female who graduated from Northwestern Law School near the bottom of her class. It also alleged that faculty members who did not support the candidate were threatened with having their bonuses withheld.
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