A federal judge in Chicago last week dismissed a lawsuit by a conservative group claiming that Northwestern University’s law school discriminates against white men when hiring faculty. It’s the second time that the nonprofit Faculty, Alumni and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) has failed in its efforts to stop a U.S. law school from turning away what it argues are more qualified white male candidates in favor of minorities and women. “Faculty hiring at American universities is a cesspool of corruption and lawlessness,” where “left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statutes and openly discriminating on account of race and sex when appointing professors,” declared the lawsuit filed in February 2025 and obtained by Atlanta Black Star. A lecture at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. (Photo: Northwestern Pritker School of Law Facebook Page) FASORP is represented by conservative attorney Jonathan Mitchell (architect of the Texas heartbeat abortion law) and by America First Legal, co-founded by Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, known for espousing white nationalist views. The law schools discriminate, the complaint says, “by hiring women and minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching ability.” ‘Punished for Speaking Out’: Detroit Officials Retaliated Against Black Man After He Sued County for Illegally Seizing His Cash and Car, Lawsuit Says The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three unnamed white male FASORP members who are tenured or tenure-track professors at other accredited law schools and alleged they are “ready and able” to apply for faculty positions at Northwestern’s law school but are prevented from being fairly considered due to the university’s mandate to “consciously discriminate in favor of Black, Hispanic, Asian, female, homosexual and transgender faculty candidates.” The complaint pointed to specific law school faculty at Northwestern that it deemed unqualified diversity hires, including Prof. Destiny Peery, “a black female who graduated from Northwestern Law School near the bottom of her class.” Citing unnamed faculty members, it claims Peery “would never even have been considered for a faculty appointment at Northwestern if she had been white or a member of a different race, and Peery was hired over white male candidates who were vastly more capable and qualified than she was.” The complaint faults Peery, who studies how the law intersects with discrimination and biases, for not producing enough published scholarship during her first few years teaching at the law school while appearing as “the token black” on many university panels and presentations. Peery was later denied tenure and left Northwestern. The plaintiffs also criticized Northwestern for hiring Jamelia Morgan, “a black woman from a low-ranked school (UC-Irvine), who had no competing offers from any schools ranked higher than Northwestern.” They chafe at the notion that “to attract Morgan, the dean gave her a $900,000 budget to start a new center at Northwestern Law School called ‘the Center for Racial and Disability Justice.’ … Northwestern Law School has far more accomplished scholars than Jamelia Morgan on its faculty, and none of them have ever been offered a $900,000 center to run. Morgan received this money only because she is a black affirmative-action hire” who won out over “white male candidates who are vastly more capable and qualified than she is.” According to the center’s website, Morgan received a B.A. in political science from Stanford University and her law degree from Yale Law School. Her scholarship and teaching examine the development of disability as a legal category in American law, disability and policing, and over-criminalization. The lawsuit also alleged that Northwestern’s law school extended offers to only three white men in the last three faculty hiring cycles, during which the school made offers to 21 candidates, noted Reuters. That didn’t represent a sea change in the predominantly white and male makeup of the law school faculty. In its ABA filing, Northwestern noted that during the 2022-23 school year, the school had 135 full-time faculty members of which 23 were people of color and 64 were women. That made the faculty 83 percent white and 53 percent men, noted abovethelaw, while the country as a whole is only about 58 percent white.   The plaintiffs asked the court to order the university to establish a new faculty-selection policy “that is based entirely on academic and scholarly merit and that explicitly disavows any consideration of race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.” In its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, filed in April, attorneys for Northwestern argued that FASORP lacked standing to sue the university because it failed to show that the would-be professors they represented suffered any injury that is “concrete, particularized and actual or imminent,” as civil rights law requires. By alleging its members were “able and ready” to apply for positions, but “faced a substantial risk of discrimination,” while failing to provide any factual basis to support those allegations, the purported injury the nonprofit complained of “rests on nothing more than speculation and conjecture,” the defendants argued. Two of the three members that FASORP claimed didn’t get a fair shake never actually applied to Northwestern’s law school and only alleged that they told faculty members at the law school that they were interested in a lateral move, and then didn’t get invited to apply, the motion said. The nonprofit failed to demonstrate that any of the three men were more qualified or even as qualified as other applicants who were offered the teaching positions, the defendants asserted. While the lawsuit said they had all taught law for many years and published scholarly articles, it did not say whether they provided CVs, research agendas, writing samples, recommendations, or other materials to support their candidacies. FASORP “does not plead any facts suggesting that Individual A, B, or C would have been hired but for their race,” Northwestern argued. Their applications could have been denied for any number of legitimate reasons, “including that they did not teach in a subject area where faculty were needed, did not teach at a sufficiently highly-ranked school, or did not otherwise have an adequate publication or academic record.” “The complaint lacks merit,” the university’s lawyers concluded. “It serves only as a vehicle to baselessly malign professors due to their race and gender and to attempt to advance FASORP’s political agenda.” U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis apparently agreed, dismissing the lawsuit on Jan. 21 without providing an explanation. The decision is the latest in a series of court setbacks for conservative legal groups targeting law schools, including unsuccessful discrimination cases against the Harvard Law Review in 2018 and the NYU Law Review in 2023, Reuters reported. FASORP also sued the Michigan Law Review for discrimination in June but voluntarily dropped the case in October. ‘The Complaint Lacks Merit’: Conservative Group Argues White Men With ‘Stellar Credentials’ Can’t Get Jobs at a Top Law School — Federal Judge Isn’t Buying It ...read more read less