Northwestern Law School Accused of Bias Against White Men in Hiring

A conservative group filed a lawsuit against Northwestern University’s law school on Tuesday, claiming that its attempts to hire more women and people of color as faculty members violate federal law prohibiting discrimination against race and sex.

The complaint, coming just over 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 that American universities hire and promote professors.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Chicago, calls that process “a cesspool of corruption and lawlessness.” It says Northwestern has deliberately sidelined white male candidates for faculty positions at the law school, giving preference to candidates of other races and gender identities.

Jon Yates, a Northwestern spokesman, said the university would 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 Opposed to Racial Preferences, named several candidates for teaching jobs at Northwestern, including well-known legal scholars who it said were denied interviews or blocked from advancing.

Of the 21 job offers made by the law school over the last three years, three went to white men, the suit says.

“For decades, left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statutes and openly discriminating on account of race and sex when appointing professors,” the complaint says. “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 ability.”

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 jobs at Northwestern.

In the complaint, the group describes itself as a nonprofit membership organization “formed for the purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia.”

Its members are not disclosed in the suit, but the group’s sweeping approach suggests that it wants to explicitly position itself as a successor to Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that sued universities on behalf of Asian American students who said they had been discriminated against when applying to colleges. A year ago, those complaints led the Supreme Court to ban affirmative action in college admissions.

The complaint is notable for its harsh attack on what it calls “leftist ideologues on faculty-appointments committees and in university D.E.I. offices,” and for its partisan tone. The lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, Jonathan F. Mitchell, is a former Texas solicitor general turned activist litigator for conservative causes.

Mr. Mitchell was the architect of S.B. 8, the Texas law passed in 2021 that effectively banned most abortions. He also defended former President Donald J. Trump’s right to appear on the Colorado presidential primary ballot as a candidate this year, which he won on 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 reach out to us.”

The lawsuit says that candidates with “stellar credentials” who were denied positions at Northwestern include Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar and then-law professor at U.C.L.A. and well-known legal blogger. It also lists Ernest A. Young, a constitutional law professor at Duke University.

A footnote says the professors had nothing to do with initiating the complaint or providing information for 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 nearly every professor currently on the Northwestern Law School faculty,” it adds. “Professor Volokh, however, is a white man, and he is neither homosexual nor transgender.”

Mr. Volokh said on Tuesday that he could not remember whether he had called Northwestern or the law school had called him. But he said that after 30 years of teaching, he had just begun a position as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and had no hard feelings.

“People get hired or don’t get hired for all sorts of various 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 been proud of their attempts to what they call diversify the legal academy by engaging in some degree of race-based affirmative action.”

Mr. Young, the Duke professor, said he was a friend of the former Northwestern law school dean who had chaired his appointments committee, and did not detect any hostility.

“I’ve got so many strikes against me that it’s hard to know which one,” he said. “I’m over 50. I’m white. I’m male. I’m right of center politically. None of these things are good. And I don’t have a Ph.D. in another discipline, which is a big hiring trend. But, you know, I’ve got a job at a really good law school.”

The complaint goes into considerable detail about several faculty hires at Northwestern, apparently relying on insider accounts, and includes language that could be seen as racially coded. For a few of the candidates, the lawsuit claims that they lacked scholarship or did not understand material. It accuses one professor of using an exam hypothetical 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 lawsuit also claims there was some horse-trading during the 2019-2020 hiring cycle. It says the law school dean at the time struck a deal with Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern professor who helped found the conservative Federalist Society, to support hiring a Federalist Society member in exchange for supporting the candidacies of a Black professor at the University of Iowa, Paul Gowder, and another professor’s wife.

The Federalist Society candidate was a gay white man, so he would pass muster, the complaint says. But he ultimately was not hired after an associate dean and some of her colleagues objected to hiring a white man, the suit says.

Mr. Gowder, now a professor at Northwestern, said Tuesday that he had “no idea of any kind of a deal,” but that he had ample credentials for the job. He graduated from Harvard Law before his 21st birthday and was a civil rights lawyer 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 résumé lists more than 40 publications of various kinds.

Mr. Calabresi, the Federalist Society founder, did not respond to requests for comment.

Alain Delaquérière and Kitty Bennett contributed research.