New Book on Harvard Law

There is a new book on Harvard Law School: Andrew Peyton Thomas's The People vs. Harvard Law: How America's Oldest Law School Turned Its Back on Free Speech. Peyton Thomas is a Harvard Law graduate himself, and wrote an amazingly thorough biography of Justice Clarence Thomas that was published in 2001. Here's what the publisher has to say about the new book:

In 2002, Kiwi Camara, a Filipino-American student studying at the Harvard Law School, joined most of his classmates in posting his class outlines for the previous year on the school website. But in his notes, Camara had used shorthand terms that some regarded as racial slurs. In the furor that followed, administrators proposed a speech code to prohibit members of the law school community from voicing racially insensitive remarks. The chain of events triggered by this decision convulsed the nation’s oldest and most prestigious school of law, and called into question its commitment to freedom of speech and basic constitutional liberties.

The clashing ideas and personalities of this case are at the core of The People v. Harvard Law. In this fascinating insider’s account, Andrew Peyton Thomas recounts how the school’s intellectual heavyweights — Charles Fried, Alan Dershowitz, Laurence Tribe, Charles Nessen [sic] and others — were drawn into open conflict with each other and with the administration. Thomas takes us into the administrative offices, faculty lounges and classrooms, showing that the Camara case is only the latest front in a culture war that has ravaged Harvard Law over the last 25 years. Racial demagogues have challenged its integrity and sense of mission; a growing cadre of Marxist-inspired professors have taught that American law is a sham controlled by white capitalist oppressors; and students who dissent from this smothering orthodoxy are hissed at in class and openly harassed throughout the school.

That last sentence sounds a bit overheated. In any event,
it occurs to me that there have been quite a few books about Harvard Law School:

• The classic One-L
  
  
• Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School
  
  
• Pinstripes and Pearls
  
  
• The High Citadel
  
  
• Poisoned Ivy: How Egos, Ideology, and Power Politics Almost Ruined Harvard Law School
  
  
• Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond
  
  
• How to Get Into Harvard Law School.

Then there was the movie The Paper Chase. It's a bit bizarre to see so much attention paid to one law school.

Stuart Buck