Prof Calls Out Emory Law Journal for Censorship

Prof Calls Out Emory Law Journal for Censorship

We have followed this story closely.

Andrew Koppelman writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Scandalous Suppression at a Law Review

It is now notorious that the Emory Law Journal commissioned and then tried to censor, as “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive,” an article that denied the existence of systemic racism. When the author refused to bowdlerize his piece, the journal rejected it. Two other contributors to the same issue of the journal withdrew their articles in protest. This has been portrayed as a familiar left/right fight, except for one detail: One of the authors who withdrew is on the left. Some have been asking, Who is that guy, and what was he thinking?

I’m that guy. I am urgently concerned about systemic racism, which I have written about extensively, but I withdrew to protest the illiberalism that has these student editors in its grip. That illiberalism is bad for the university and bad for racial equality. It reflects an increasingly influential conception of racial equality that is indifferent to the welfare of the people it purports to help. This isn’t a left/right thing.

The law journal had invited papers for a symposium honoring Michael Perry, one of the most important living constitutional theorists. An invitation of this sort normally includes a commitment to publish if basic scholarly standards are met. One invitee was the University of San Diego professor Larry Alexander, whose piece engaged with Perry’s work on racial discrimination. Alexander argued that the principal causes of Black poverty are not racism but the cultural factors that have produced family disintegration, which in turn have produced poor educational achievement and crime.

Read the whole thing.

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