Just as leftist academics like to slant their courses to influence students and leftist journalists pitch their stories to always make conservatives and libertarians the bad guys, so too with leftist judges. They know how they want cases to turn out and aren’t going to let fairness get in the way.
We now read that the judge who heard Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Obama appointee Allison Burroughs, was doing that in her handling of that case at trial. Writing on Power Line, Steven Hayward reflects on a remarkable piece published in, of all places, The New Yorker. It was written by Harvard Law School professor Jennie Suk Gersen, who happens to dislike unfairness in the law. (She wrote scathingly about the Title IX inquisitions during the Obama years.) Gersen managed to get hold of the whole trial record, and in it, she found evidence that Judge Burroughs was trying to keep some things out of the public eye.
Hayward writes, “Keep in mind that this trial was not a jury trial, but a bench trial. I don’t know if it is typical for a federal district bench trial to have lengthy sidebars on evidentiary questions, but in this instance Prof. Gersen makes a good case that Judge Burroughs wanted to suppress potential evidence embarrassing to Harvard from being mentioned in open court where reporters and the audience would hear it.”
Read the whole thing, including the article by Professor Gersen.
One more tantalizing fact: The Supreme Court requested the entire record of the proceedings. Perhaps the justices had some inkling that the case had not been handled in an above-board fashion? In any event, this seems to bode poorly for Harvard.