Harvard Law Review Retaliates Against Student Who Leaked Documents to Washington Free Beacon
“Continued violations may give rise to additional disciplinary proceedings.”
This is all about the accusation that the Harvard Law Review considers race in deciding what to publish.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Harvard Law Review Retaliates Against Alleged Leaker—And Demands He Press Free Beacon To Destroy Documents
The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents to the Washington Free Beacon and demanded, as part of the journal’s disciplinary process, that he request their destruction, according to emails obtained by the Free Beacon. The demand came as the law review was under a document retention order stemming from multiple federal probes, raising questions about whether the journal was also trying to interfere with a government investigation.
The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 that it was investigating reports of racial discrimination at the journal, according to the New York Times. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the government in that investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.
The journal told Wasserman to “[r]equest that any parties with whom you have shared Confidential Materials … delete or return them to The Review.” The instruction, conveyed by the law review’s disciplinary committee on May 20, came as the journal was investigating Wasserman for allegedly leaking documents to the Free Beacon, whose report on the law review’s racial preferences had triggered probes by the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services in addition to the Justice Department.
People who participate in such probes are protected from retaliation by federal law. But two days after the journal asked Wasserman to round up documents, it informed him that he would be receiving a “Formal Reprimand” in his law review file.
“This Formal Reprimand informs you that your actions violate Law Review policies and do not reflect our community expectations,” the journal’s disciplinary committee wrote on May 22. “Continued violations may give rise to additional disciplinary proceedings.”
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Comments
Besides the private data of those on the Law Review and the editing of articles in future issues, what confidential information would a law review have?
Internal communications on selecting articles for publication, and on choosing editors. Which is the subject of the Beacon article and the subsequent DOJ investigation.
You have to wonder whether it’s the alleged “leak” to the Beacon that’s being punished, which might be a policy or employment matter, or the cooperation with federal investigators, which is a matter of federal law.