A Mass Leak Showed the Harvard Law Review Assessed Articles for DEI Values. Some Authors Say That’s Not a Problem.

Updated June 29, 2025, at 8:48 p.m.

The Harvard Law Review — a student-edited publication that is America’s most prominent law journal — has found itself engulfed in a public battle over accusations that it unfairly boosted Black and Latino authors.

Since April, the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing news site, has published a steady drumbeat of leaked documents from the Law Review’s article submission process, which the Free Beacon alleged documented discrimination against white and Asian authors. In the months since, three federal agencies — the Department of Health and Human Services, the Education Department, and the Justice Department — opened investigations into the allegations.

And then, on June 19, the Free Beacon dropped a bombshell: nearly 2,300 pages showing how the Law Review’s editors evaluated article submissions.

The Free Beacon claimed they had clear evidence that the Law Review’s editors used a racially conscious and ideologically discriminatory rubric. But many authors whose articles were discussed in the leak said they saw nothing to object to in the Law Review’s process — even as others agreed that the process considered race in pernicious ways.

The leaked documents show individual editors’ assessments of 416 articles submitted for the most recent volume of the Law Review, all anonymized at this stage of the review process. The Crimson was able to identify and contact 360 of the authors.

Of the 20 authors who gave statements in response, 12 said there were no major issues in the criteria used by the Harvard Law Review and that the editors’ rubric did not consider race inappropriately. Five objected to the rubric — though some thought it would be concerning for the government to intervene. The remainder did not address the Law Review’s use of the rubric.

“I thought the memo discussing my article was thoughtful and incisive,” wrote Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago, whose paper on free speech law and stalking was rejected. “I do not think there is anything wrong with student editors taking questions of diversity into account, particularly when it comes to citations.”

University of Oregon law professor Mohsen Manesh said that his ethnicity was not discussed in the leak, and that his submission was rejected primarily because the editor was unpersuaded by his arguments.

But Manesh, whose paper described limits on shareholders’ rights to make political proposals, wrote that the Law Review’s rubric “seems expressly tilted towards papers that push a DEI agenda and away from papers like my which advocate for more neutral frameworks.”

The Rubric

The question at stake is not whether the 2,288 leaked pages show racial discrimination against papers’ authors, whose identities were concealed from editors at that stage in the review process. Editors were likewise not asked to consider authors’ race.

And leaked documents from the Law Review show that, in fact, white authors’ works made up a substantially higher fraction of the papers that passed review than failed review. (The Law Review did not comment for this article, but wrote in a public statement in May that it “does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication.”)

Though other leaks showed enthusiasm for soliciting authors from minority backgrounds or less-prestigious law schools, the latest documents instead raise questions about how the Law Review assessed articles’ content, citation practices, and “impact.”

The documents include memos — reviews by individual editors — of more than 400 submitted articles. The reviews are part of the “rotopool” stage of evaluations, which occurs after an initial screening of the approximately 3,000 submissions the Law Review receives each year.

During the rotopool stage, one editor reviews a submission in detail and decides whether to recommend its progression to the next stage of evaluation, where it is considered by a member of the twelve-person articles committee.

The rotopool rubric includes categories like quality of writing, quality of research, and originality — but also includes a section on “impact” and a section on “breadth of research,” which have both drawn mixed opinions from authors.

“Impact” asks evaluators to assess whether or not the articles “address an issue or provide a solution that can help promote DEI values,” and the “breadth of research” section asks if the articles “cite sources from diverse voices (e.g., junior scholars, non-T14 schools, underrepresented groups.)”

The “impact” criterion drew harsh criticism from several scholars, including Manesh, who felt it tilted the field toward papers that toed a progressive political line.

“How much they liked our article is less important to the world than their thumb on the scale for authors and sources of preferred races or papers that fit an ideological orthodoxy,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Stephen E. Sachs, who co-authored a rejected paper arguing that parents should be able to cast proxy votes on their children’s behalf.

But Northwestern University law professor James Pfander, whose paper on tort law was accepted, wrote that the “impact” section “hardly shows that such considerations conclusively determined the article’s fate in the selection process.”

“Putting a label on the process of considering the larger social impact of a publication decision (call it novelty, inclusion, equity, or whatnot) does not in my opinion necessarily change the nature of the process or cast doubt on its legitimacy,” Pfander wrote.

The “quality of research” section calls into question the “breadth” of the author’s research. Some reviewers used it to evaluate the racial diversity of sources used in submissions, though most focused on whether those sources had already been widely cited or were new voices in the scholarly literature.

George Mason University law professor Thomas P. Gallanis wrote that “one serious problem” in the rubric is the apparent consideration of the races of the scholars cited in the article, saying it is “irrelevant to academic quality.”

“The race of the author is irrelevant to the article’s academic contribution,” Gallanis wrote. “So too are the races of the scholars cited, except if an author fails to cite the relevant scholarly literature.”

Lakier, from the University of Chicago, wrote that she thought that favoring citation diversity would instead force authors to think more critically about the literature they draw on.

“Scholars tend to cite the same few papers again and again. Sometimes that is because those are the best things out there. But sometimes it is just familiarity and path dependency,” she wrote. “Pushing writers to be more thoughtful about who and what they cite is not a bad thing.”

“Reporting around the leak has suggested that the editors acted with some kind of perverse bias because they assessed the scholars I cited,” wrote Jacob Schriner-Briggs, a visiting professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. “This misunderstands something important about legal scholarship: reading widely and considering arguments from a diverse set of academics does not diminish the quality of one’s work, it improves it.”

And Temple University law professor Amy Cohen, whose paper was rejected, wrote that she thought the race of cited scholars could be relevant.

“Our article directly grapples with the role of restorative justice as a response to the extensively documented racial discipline gap in public schools,” Cohen wrote. “So it makes good academic sense that the editors would evaluate whether we engaged broadly with education scholars, including scholars of color often drawing on practical experiences in education.”

Pulling Back the Curtains

Law reviews, most of which are run by students, generally review and select papers behind closed doors. Unlike at peer-reviewed journals, would-be law review authors may never see a copy of the critiques their work receives.

The massive leak provided a rare window into the Harvard Law Review’s behind-the-scenes deliberations.

“The leak was surreal,” Schriner-Briggs wrote. “It gave me perspective on how the editorial staff viewed my article that I never expected to obtain.”

Some authors said their papers received feedback that was in-depth and insightful. But not all were happy with what they saw.

“In many instances law students lack the knowledge to assess an article’s academic contribution,” Gallanis wrote, noting that a Law Review editor “wrote that my article was ‘potentially novel’ but ‘Honestly, I don’t know enough about trust law to know!’”

G. Alex Sinha, a Hofstra University law professor who co-authored a paper on how the criminal legal system burdens the families of incarcerated people, wrote that “one editor completely misunderstood the social science study at the heart of the piece.”

“Then, despite acknowledging his lack of familiarity with the relevant literature, complained that the piece ‘felt’ like it wasn’t engaging with enough of it,” Sinha wrote.

Nonetheless, many legal scholars whose papers were included in the Law Review leak said they were at least as concerned with the manner of the information’s release as with what it revealed.

University of Minnesota law professor June Carbone wrote that she found it “disturbing to see what was intended to be a confidential process leaked to the public for what appears to be political motives.”

Some authors feared that leaks could have a chilling effect on law review editors’ willingness to write frank reviews of submissions.

“They’re written with an expectation of confidentiality, and the honesty and quality of future reviews may be undermined now that their secrecy is no longer assured,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos.

“I fear that leaks like this will hinder the open conversation necessary to make difficult decisions about which articles to choose,” Michigan State University law professor Justin L. Simard wrote.

Even some critics of the Law Review’s processes said that federal scrutiny and punitive demands were a far greater danger than poor criteria for submissions.

Emory University law professor Alexander “Sasha” Volokh, a former Law Review executive editor, wrote that the publication “should be able to choose its articles on whatever basis it likes, even if that basis is horrible.”

“Any government effort to prevent this is violating HLR’s rights, which is about a million times worse than whatever HLR is doing,” Volokh wrote. “Therefore, I support HLR all the way in its current legal fight.”

—Staff writer Megan L. Blonigen can be reached at megan.blonigen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @MeganBlonigen.

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.