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The University of Michigan is being sued over allegations it illegally shuts out White, straight male applicants to its student law journal because of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) priorities.
A nonprofit group that opposes affirmative action filed a complaint in federal court on June 18 accusing the University of Michigan Law School’s student-run law journal, The Michigan Law Review, of “using race and sex preferences to select its members and articles.”
The complaint alleges that, until recently, new members were selected based on their first-year grades and performance on a writing competition. But it claims “far-left students” who were dissatisfied with the demographics that resulted from this selection process pushed to incorporate race and sex preferences to select new members instead.
“The Michigan Law Review implements these illegal race and sex preferences by inviting students to submit a 750-word ‘personal statement’ when applying for membership on the Law Review. Applicants are not only permitted but encouraged to identify their race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in the personal statement, even though it is illegal for the Law Review to discriminate on these grounds when selecting student members,” the lawsuit states.
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According to the complaint, 60% of new student members are chosen through a “holistic review” process which considers the applicant’s personal statement among the academic factors.
The lawsuit accuses the journal’s “Holistic Review Committee” of selecting new student members by giving preference “to women, racial minorities, homosexuals, and transgender people” over heterosexual White men “with better grades and better scores on the components of the Law Review’s writing competition.”
“The members of the Holistic Review Committee rig the holistic-review process to ensure that the eventual makeup of the incoming Law Review members contains what the committee members regard as a sufficiently ‘diverse’ number of women, nonAsian racial minorities, and homosexual or transgender students,” it says.
The lawsuit also claims that the Michigan Law Review engages in discrimination when selecting articles for publication by prioritizing diverse voices and instructing editors to cite “marginalized identities” in its sourcing.
The complaint was filed by the nonprofit Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP), and named the Michigan Law Review Association, the University of Michigan, several individuals who oversee the law journal, members of the journal’s Holistic Review Committee, the Board of Regents and the university’s vice president, who also serves as its general counsel.
The University of Michigan and Michigan Law Review did not return Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
The university denied the suit’s allegations in a statement to The Detroit Free Press.
“The University remains steadfast in its commitment to following the law,” spokeswoman Kay Jarvis said. “We will vigorously defend against these allegations.”
The complaint follows heightened scrutiny over DEI efforts at public universities due to the Trump administration’s actions to eliminate these racial and gender identity priorities.
In March, the University of Michigan became the latest public institution to shutter its DEI offices.
In a message to the university, the president and other top leaders said Trump’s executive orders threatening funding cuts brought “urgency to the issue” that had been debated since 2023.
In February, the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights sent a letter to departments of education in every state telling them to remove DEI policies or risk losing federal funding.
Fox News’ Rachel del Guidice contributed to this report.
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