UPDATE: My bad, I didn’t notice the date (Nov. 2003) on the article, which was just emailed to me. A reader reports in the comments that “Review membership in last year’s incoming editor class had roughly the same male/female proportion as the HLS class as a whole. There are currently no affirmative action proposals pending.” I still think the information below is quite interesting, and the updated information makes me wonder: (a) what was the fate of the affirmative action proposal? and (b) Did the Law Review otherwise take steps to raise the percentage of women, or do the statistics just naturally ebb and flow?
But some HLS professors, including HLS Dean Elena Kagan, said if the Review announced an affirmative action policy, it would imply that women could not be accepted based on merit alone.
All three of the Review’s faculty advisors—who are also all women—do not support introducing affirmative action for women.
“Such a plan would offer Law Review membership to perhaps a handful more women per class while making all women selected for the Law Review wonder whether they would have been selected absent such a program (and making other Review editors, as well as judges and other future employers, wonder the same thing),” HLS Professor and Review faculty advisor Carol S. Steiker told the Record.
According to the article, the Review does practice race and disability-based affirmative action.