The Volokh Conspiracy

Orin quotes Leiter as follows, in suggesting that Elizabeth Warren would not have listed herself as a Native American to benefit from affirmative action: “For affirmative action purposes, all law schools care about are African-Americans and Latinos.” But he also quotes Leiter as follows: “[B]ecause the AALS aggressively polices the racial and ethnic diversity of law faculties [editor's note: as does the ABA, which is of course in charge of accreditation], law schools are careful to make sure anyone who could count as an under-represented minority is so-listed.”

So if law schools are worried about not having “enough” underrepresented minority faculty to satisfy the AALS (and the ABA), and if Native Americans count as underrepresented minority faculty (they do), surely it gives a law professor a potential advantage to promote oneself as a Native American.

This is not to say that Warren’s hiring at Harvard had anything to do with her dubious claim of minority status. But that’s a red herring. The issue isn’t whether Harvard or anyone else would or would not have hired Warren otherwise. The issue is whether Warren claimed dubious minority status because she thought that on the margins it might benefit her. [The issue, in short, is Warren's integrity, not whether she "deserves" to be at Harvard based on her academic achievements. In fact, Warren has had an extremely impressive academic career, especially given that she started with the serious disadvantage of not in any way taking the traditional 'elite law school to elite clerkship to elite law firm' route that almost every professor at an elite law school has taken.]

Perhaps not. But all she has to do to clear things up is to answer the following question: “why did you list yourself as a minority professor when you were a professor at Texas and Penn, but then didn’t do so once you arrived at Harvard.” I can think of plausible explanations that would not reflect poorly on Warren, but she hasn’t as yet provided such an explanation. All she’s said is that she’s proud of her Native American heritage, which hardly explains why she listed herself at Penn and Texas and not at Harvard.

Note to Warren’s campaign: If you want to provide a written response to the query above, I’d be happy to post it on this blog.

UPDATE: Warren now claims that the answer the query raised above is that she hoped to meet and interact with other lawprofs who similarly had Native American ancestry. Professor Jacobson responds that this doesn’t make sense, because the AALS guide doesn’t tell one’s colleague which minority group one is claiming membership in. Read his post and decide for yourself.

A controversy has broken out in Massachusetts over the fact that Harvard Law School has claimed professor and current senatorial candidate Elizabeth as a minority member of the faculty based on apparent (but as yet unconfirmed) Native American ancestry. The Brown camp seems to think this is big news [update: the campaign has called on her to apologize for allowing Harvard to claim her as a "minority"; this, as we'll see, doesn't make any sense, because at the time Warren was claiming herself as a minority, and Harvard was only following her lead], Warren responds that she’s unaware that Harvard claimed her as a minority professor, but that she’s proud of her Indian ancestry. Her colleague Charles Fried, who was chair of the appointments committee when she was hired, claims that Warren’s Native American ancestry never came up in the hiring process, and that he only became aware of it later.

My contribution to this controversy is that there seems to be some disingenuousness going on. Warren says that she could not “recall” ever listing her Native American background when applying for college or a job.

The old AALS Directory of Faculty guides are online (through academic libraries) at Hein Online. The directories starting listing minority faculty in an appendix in 1986. There’s Elizabeth Warren, listed as a professor at Texas. I spot-checked three additional directories from when she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, including 1995-96, the year Harvard offered her a position. Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren.

So, we know one thing with almost 100% certainty: Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor. We know something else with 90%+ certainty: (at least some) folks at Harvard were almost certainly aware that she identified as a minority law professor, though they may not have known which ethnic group she claimed to be belong to, and it may not have played any role in her hiring.

But it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty. Now that’s passing strange. When the AALS directory form came around before Warren arrived at Harvard, she was proud enough of her Native American ancestry to ask that she be listed among the minority law professors. (Or, in the unlikely even that she just allowed law school administrators to fill out the forms for her without reviewing them, they were aware that she claimed such ancestry, and she didn’t object when she was listed.) Once she arrived at Harvard, however, she no longer chose to be listed as a minority law professor.

Hmmm.

UPDATE: This story reminded me of the 1980s case of the twin red-haired Boston firefighters who claimed to be black, based on a photo of a great-grandmother and alleged oral history. While I remembered that they had gotten fired for their alleged fraud, I didn’t remember this detail:

Under current rules, said [general counsel to the state personnel office] Ms. Dale, candidates who say they are members of minority groups are judged by appearance, documented personal history and identification with a minority community. Disputes over claims of minority status are resolved by the Department of Personnel Administration.

And indeed, there eventually was a two-day administrative hearing, in which the hearing officer determined that the twins failed all three criteria, and thus were not black. A judge upheld the ruling, finding that the twins had claimed minority status in bad faith.I have to admit being under the impression until now that as a legal matter, minority status was an in issue of self-reporting. But at least in the Massachusetts Civil Service system, one can get fired for “racial fraud.”