Treated as Equals?

For many, the case of the Harvard Law Revue is closed.

With few exceptions, the parody of an article by the late Mary Joe Frug has been universally condemned--from faculty to students to the president of the Harvard Law Review, Emily R. Schulman '85.

The annual Revue spoof edition, intended only for internal distribution, was leaked this year to a group of students at the Law School. They immediately and forcefully condemned the piece, "He-Manifesto of Post-Mortem Legal Feminism (From The Desk of Mary Doe)." The piece mocked Frug's article, "A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto."

And if the title was not sufficiently morbid, the Revue was distributed on the first anniversary of Frug's murder in Cambridge.

The nature of the parody is no longer controversial, but its implications go beyond Mary Joe Frug. Student activists, as well as a contingent of liberal professors, have seized upon the incident to condemn the Law School, its faculty appointments committee and its overall treatment of women and minorities.

And inside the Law Review, for decades the arena of the Law School's elite, the parody has sparked a debate over the journal's treatment of women and feminist scholarship.

Specifically, a group of editors, mostly women, as well as some professors say the spoof was a new twist on a recurring theme, symptomatic of more widespread disrespect towards women at the prestigious journal.

"Women aren't looked upon as the upper crust of the Law Review," says second-year Law student and Review editor Rebecca L. Eisenberg. "Women are not given as much credit for their intelligence and achievements."

"The general atmosphere makes me feel like we're breaking into a male institution," Eisenberg says.

Eisenberg's sentiments were echoed in a letter written by 15 Law School professors and addressed to the Law School community April 20.

"Many students have experienced the Review, like much of the Law School, as an environment that is seriously hostile to women," the professors wrote.

Professor of Law Elizabeth Bartholet, who signed the letter, described the journal to The Crimson as "an extraordinarily exclusive white male preserve."

Judging from the debate in the Law School as a whole, critics of the Review have a substantial following, but by no means represent universal opinion.

Still, the journals' critics are more outspoken than its advocates. Editors who have defended the journal from such criticism in the past would not comment for this report, deferring queries to Schulman, the Review's president.

Sings posted in the Review's Gannett House offices instruct staffers to refuse comment, saying that only Schulman should talk to the press. Schulman, who has herself condemned the Frug parody while defending the Review, did not return repeated phone calls over the last month.

Those Review advocates who do talk to the press, including a few students and some professors, argue that the journal is as hospitable to women as to men. The journal's environment can be harsh, they say, but the harshness is not gender-oriented.

"I have spent two years at Gannett House and I can state unequivocally that the Law Review is not a sexist institution," says Carol Platt, a third-year student who served as the Review's first female managing editor last year.

She says the accusations of sexism are unwarranted and risk undermining legitimate complaints of sexism and sexual harassment leveled by women in the workplace.

"Sexism and sexual harassment are serious problems and it makes me angry to see the gravity and importance of these issues trivialized," Platt says.

And though professors do not have a hands-on role at the student-run publication, some scholars refute the charges aimed at the Review.

"The people I have spoken with have not given me the impression that there is a problem [of sexism] on the Law Review," says Goldston Professor of Law William D. Andrews.

Detlev F. Vagts '49, who is Bemis Professor of International Law, also says he has never heard that women are marginalized at the Review.

Vagts and Andrews statements are in marked contrast to those of their colleague, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence H. Tribe '62, who a month ago equated authors of the Frug parody to Holocaust revisionists.

But Tribe does not blame sexism at the Review on current editors alone; he says the problem is an old one.

"I have felt this for at least a decade," Tribe says. "[The parody] was simply one more straw on an already weakened camel's back."

Others say that sexism within the Review is not particular to the institution, but a reflection of attitudes towards women in the legal profession and in society in general.

"If the Law Review is sexist, the best explanation may be that the legal culture is sexist," says Elizabeth Wolstein, a second-year student who is co-chair of the Review's book review and commentary office.

"People at the Law Review judge each other in large part on how they speak; that the vocabulary of the profession comes more naturally to men is surely a function of something larger than the institutional atmosphere of the Law Review," Wolstein says.

Rhonda Adams, a second-year student and editor, also says that sexism is no more prevalent at the Law Review than in other places.

"I think that if you attack the Law Review you're acting like [sexism] is contained in that one white building," Adams says.

"In America and in Harvard Law School there is an environment that fosters this kind of thing," she says.

Susan Estrich, who was elected as the first woman president of the Review in 1976, says while she is not familiar with current circumstances at the Review, she "Found it no worse there than any place else" during her tenure.

"Sexism exist in our society as a whole," says Estrich, now a law professor at the University of Southern California.

"What made the Law Review better was that it was a meritocracy," she says. "Gender and race were not important."

Although Tribe also says that the issue of sexism is not particular to the Law School or the Review, he characterizes his judgment as "faint praise."

"It's not more pervasive than in America on average...but that's not saying much," Tribe said.

Besides the general criticisms of disrespect, three areas of concern are continually raised with respect to women at the Law Review: specific events of harassment, attitudes among Review staff members toward feminist scholarship and the statistical disparity between men and women.

COMPLAINTS OF HARASSMENT

Asked to discuss harassment at the Review, Eisenberg cites two incidents:

. Eisenberg refers to a staff meeting in January during which a number of women were particularly outspoken. A male editor remarked at the time that the meeting "was the best argument against the 19th Amendment [he had] ever seen," Eisenberg says.

. Esienberg says the editor sparked such an uproar that he posted a note of apology the following week.

In defense of the editor, another staff member of the Review, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says that the man's remark was "a joke in poor taste."

"It was a careless off-the-cuff remark," the editor says. "He didn't mean to be intimidating."

. Eisenberg also cites an incident in which she says an editor on the Review told her that "rape is the price that women pay for freedom."

"Several men [on the Review] have said to me that rape is something women make up," Eisenberg says.

Beyond specific incidents of harassment, some women editors complain of episodes that have been, as second-year student and co-articles editor Annelise Riles puts it, "more subtle and harder to put a label on."

"Certain men walk past you there and will not acknowledge you in a conversation," Riles says. "Guys will ask my co-editor questions, and might ignore me."

And according to second-year student and editor Kunal M. Parker, before the Review's elections in January many women were advised not seek upper-level positions.

"There were women at the Law Review that were told...these positions go to the 'intellectual powerhouses' of the Review," Parker says.

"A lot of women on the Review told me it was such a coup to get my position [of articles editors]," Riles said. "I think most of the women at the Review feel this way."

Although this year marked the election of the Review's third woman president, Emily Schulman, Parker says Schulman's was a struggle against unfriendly attitudes towards women.

"Emily made it in spite of it, not because it wasn't there," Parker says.

"[The women presidents] have had to work harder in a way that the long string of male presidents haven't," Parker says.

Wolstein counters that other editors at the Review were supportive when she said she was interested in running for high office.

"The only person that ever discouraged me from running for a position for the very reason that I was a woman was the Law Review's woman president," Wolstein says.

"She said she didn't think it would make a good impression on the incoming [second-year law students] if they came back in August to see two women 'running around in leadership positions,'" Wolstein says.

FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP

When the original Mary Joe Frug article was considered for publication, a bitter debate ensued in the Review staff about the editing of the piece.

That debate, which foreshadowed the eventual parody, is emblematic of the Review's varying attitudes towards feminist scholarship.

"It's a fairly divided organization [on the issue of feminist scholarship]" Parker says.

Tribe, an outspoken critic of the journal, acknowledges that it has not prevented feminist scholarship from receiving fair treatment.

"The Law Review has been quite admirable in publishing a wide range of feminist and other perspectives," Tribe says.

And although Parker says the Frug parody constituted an attack on feminist thinking, he points out that the original piece was published in the Review, along with four responses by other feminist scholars.

Still, Riles and Eisenberg label attitudes towards feminist legal thinking as sexist.

Riles speaks of complaints she received from other editors after she reviewed a book by Black feminist legal scholar Patricia Williams. Other editors called her criticism of Williams too soft, Riles says.

Riles says he thinks the criticism stemmed from the fact that Williams "was writing from a Black woman's point of view and they didn't like it."

WOMEN IN THE MINORITY

Like many institutions at the once all-male University, the Law Review has consisted tthroughout the years of disproportionately few women and racial minorities.

Generally, the percentage of women who apply for the Law Review has been lower than the percentage they comprise in each class, the Harvard Law Record reported in 1990.

Although women currently make up approximately 42 percent of the Law School, only about 25 percent of the editors at the Review are women.

In the Law School's class of 1992, 10 of 44 Review editors are female or approximately 23 percent, according to Sam Hirsch, treasurer of the Review.

And in the class of 1993, 15 of 41 editors, or 37 percent, are women, Hirsch says.

In 1982, after about a year of internal controversy, the editors decided to institute affirmative action policies that took race, but not gender, into account.

Estrich said that when she first went on board the Review in 1975, she was one of two women selected at editors.

As the result of an aggressive outreach effort performed when she was president in 1976-1977, seven or eight women came on the Review the following year, she says.

And this sort of outreach may well be the critics' solution to resolving lingering issues of sexism at the Review.

"A lot of the problems we face could be drastically reduced by having more women there and having more women apply," Eisenberg says.

Schulman told The Crimson earlier this month that an active recruitment effort is underway at the Review to reach out to women at the Law School.

Schulman also plans to create a task force to investigate the treatment and status of women at the Law Review.

Eisenberg says the task force could address a range of problems within the ranks of the Review.

"Hopefully it will instruct us to be sensitive to lot of things that are being overlooked, like race, class and sexual orientation," Eisenberg says.