This article from an admittedly conservative publication criticizes a the subject matter of an essay contest. While the subject of voter suppression is admittedly a valuable topic to write on and is not inherently biased the way the issue is framed is very one sided and seems to imply only one type of answer is acceptable. This is sad at an institution that says it values differences in opinion.
While, yes, unfortunately UChicago has entire departments experiencing wokism at the moment - The English Department comes to mind - LLSO isn’t one of them. Because it’s not a department. It’s a major. Not sure what the “Law Letters & Society Review” is, exactly or whether it’s even launched yet. The only thing that pops up with a google search is the news about the major being under review (it was suspended for two years while that took place).
David Lebow isn’t tenure-track faculty and he doesn’t have any sort of assignment at an actual academic department. His administrative position for LLSO is “associate director” and his appointment is “assistant senior instructional professor” which is one of the several teaching-focused tracks at UChicago. He teaches the required “legal reasoning” course as well as an intro course for interested students. He’s new and doesn’t seem to have a prior affiliation with UChicago at all, or any current affiliation outside of LLSO. Notably, he’s not at all affiliated with the law school. This is quite surprising. LLSO was initiated and, for many years, run by the highly-esteemed professor of Law Dennis Hutchinson. Hutchinson used to be the one teaching “Legal Reasoning” and served as an important connection for anyone wishing to move on to the study of law upon graduation. This is a real pivot to assign a more obscure instructor like Lebow to those responsibilities.
Lebow’s wordy partisan spin risks rubbing off on the major and damaging its reputation further as an unserious course of study. It’s also Exhibit A for why it’s crucial to assign genuine faculty with a tenure home (ie someone that other faculty wish to invite to join this or that department) to these experimental centers of thought. Or maybe Lebow should have run his ideas past someone like David Axelrod who no doubt would have helped him re-phrase to sound a little more scholarly and less partisan.
National Review supported South African Apartheid and Jim Crow-era voting rights restrictions in the south, so it’s likely best to read anything they write about “true diversity” with a grain of salt the size of Mars.