Randy Barnett wrote on February 25 that:
... for several years, a group of conservative and libertarian law professors from a variety of law schools has quietly been urging the Association of American Law Schools, which has taken a leadership role in addressing racial and gender diversity–including by establishing a Racial Diversity Task Force in 1999–to do the same with viewpoint or political diversity. Our complaint was not limited to the gross political one-sidedness of the Annual Meeting of the AALS, but primarily concerned the gross political imbalance of law faculties–especially in such subjects as public law where viewpoint most affects a professor’s legal scholarship and teaching.
Although we were treated respectfully–and some marginal, though welcome, steps were taken this year to diversify the annual AALS program–as the following letter to the AALS explains, our requests for concrete preliminary steps to address the existing pervasive imbalance of law faculties have apparently been denied. ...
Having worked patiently behind the scenes for several years, we believe it is time to make our complaint more public.
He then posted an open letter to the AALS leadership that powerfully makes the case for viewpoint diversity.
The AALS has now responded and Barnett has posted the response, of which he observes that:
... we are grateful to Dean Areen for her courteous reception and to the Executive Committee for meeting with us in January of 2016. We wrote our letter because we had received no formal response to our requests in over a year, and appreciate the response we have now received. But, with all due respect, this response fails to address, or even mention, the thrust of our proposals to address the current imbalance on law school faculties–proposals which we reiterated in our letter of last week.
Indeed, this letter can fairly be read as a silent rejection of these suggestions. Oddly, it discusses an idea we do not mention in the letter to which it is responding, while failing to respond to the ones we do.
Indeed, if you asked me (not that anyone did), I'd say the AALS letter is the usual bullshit. And its time for a change.
