Trump Administration Launches Probes of Harvard Law Review’s Racial Preferences

The Education Department and HHS will investigate whether the journal violated civil rights law

By Aaron Sibarium

The Trump administration on Monday launched multiple probes of Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review, citing allegations that the flagship law journal discriminates based on race.

The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services will conduct separate investigations of the university after the Washington Free Beacon published a news report Friday revealing that the law review uses race to select both editors and articles for publication. The report was based on a trove of internal documents.

The probes—to be conducted by each agency’s office for civil rights—come days after former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell vowed to sue Harvard over the journal’s policies, which include evaluating articles on both the race of the author and the racial diversity of its citations.