Four Harvard lawprofs who stood on principle

Worth a close reading: Wesley Yang profiles four feminist Harvard Law School professors (Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, Janet Halley) who have taken a strong stand in favor of due process in Title IX proceedings, in the face of the sorts of pressures you can imagine. [Chronicle of Higher Education; earlier here (letter with 28 signers), here and here (Suk), here (Bartholet), here (Halley), and here]

It’s a long overdue profile in the national press for these four brilliant women, and let’s hope the first of many. Their courage and principle should stand as an inspiration and challenge to others in academic life.

3 Comments

  • See, however, https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/07/scenes-from-the-progressive-freakout-1.php (“First, the 1935 case Gersen references here is Schechter Poultry, and I’m guessing she’s never actually read it, or she might know that the case wasn’t decided by a narrow “conservative majority”—Schechter was a 9 – 0 decision, which means even the Court’s liberal members like Brandeis and Cardozo thought Congress had gone too far in delegating power to the Roosevelt Administration. And far from striking down a law that “protected consumers,” the case struck down the National Recovery Act, which totally screwed consumers by establishing industry cartels to keep prices high. How, exactly, did that “protect” consumers? How was the consumer served by sending Jacob Maged to jail for charging a consumer 35 cents to clean and press a suit instead of the 40 cents the government mandated?”)

  • It would be interesting indeed to see what the Harvard law profs and others think about what the University of Wisconsin should do now that an accused rapist has been acquitted

    One interesting question, and I’d love to hear people’s views on it—do the contours of prohibited sexual conduct have to mirror exactly the rape laws of a particular state? The answer may differ between private and public universities.

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  • […] the others are Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and former federal judge Nancy Gertner – profiled by Wesley Yang in an excellent new piece for the Chronicle of Higher […]