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Man Bites Dog: Law Professor Sues Students

From Above the Law (internal links omitted) comes a real man bites dog story:

Richard Peltz teaches torts and con law at the William H. Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Within Arkansas, he is a well-known expert on freedom of speech, cited by the Arkansas Supreme Court. In 2005, he exercised his freedom of speech while talking about affirmative action during a con law lecture. From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

In that class, Peltz displayed a satirical article about the death of Rosa Parks and made comments about friends who weren’t admitted to law school because of affirmative action, according to a letter students wrote about a year and a half later to law school Dean Chuck Goldner. The students also said Peltz promised to give black students who scored as high as white students an extra point on the final exam.

Apparently, the satirical article was Now We Can Finally Put Civil Rights Behind Us, from the Onion.

Though the issue was resolved in 2005, the allegations of racism reemerged in 2007, during a controversy over there being no black students on the Law Review. (The admissions website says the school has 440 students, and that 30% of the 2007 entering class was “of color.")

From this description, it sounds like there’s a race war brewing at the UALR’s Law School. And Professor Peltz just put himself in the middle of it, suing his black students and Arkansas’s black law association for defamation:

In a nine-page lawsuit filed last week, he complains that the defendants, students Valerie D. Nation of Little Rock and Chrishuana L. Clark of Pine Bluff, who are officers or former officers with the university’s Black Law Student Association, and attorney Eric Spencer Buchanan, president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society, have been making false accusations against him around the law school and statewide legal community since the fall of 2005. In the lawsuit, he asks for unspecified punitive and compensatory damages.

I know no more of the details than what ATL and the links provided, so Ican;t comment on the merits of the suit. If Professor Peltz behaved as described in the article, however, his conduct was unprofessional and even moronic (in my opinion, a qualification I hasten to add just in case Professor Peltz is feeling really litigious). It’s perfectly legitimate for a law professor to dissent from the prevailing academic views on diversity. It’s perfectly appropriate to raise that dissent in class, as part of airing all sides of the debate. But being a jerk about it is just plain stupid.

Worse yet, being a jerk about such issues discredits legitimate dissent. The academic left will hold Peltz up as the exemplar of how critics of affirmative action think.