Harvard Crimson, How Grievances at the Harvard Law Review Became Ammunition for the White House:
A string of leaks this spring made the Law Review a target for the Trump administration. But the same fights — over the Israel-Palestine conflict, race, and meritocracy — have a longer history inside its own walls.
It was November 2023, the Harvard Law Review was embroiled in bitter debates over a blog post that the war in Gaza as a genocide, and Daniel F. Wasserman was fed up.
“A proposal to block the publication of a blog is out of the ordinary for typical blog posts, but then again most blog posts on international humanitarian law don’t ignore barbaric acts of terrorism,” Wasserman, then a second-year Harvard Law School student, wrote in an email blast to the Law Review’s members.
Wasserman was angry that the blog post addressed Israeli violence against Palestinians, but not Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. He was angry because he felt Jewish perspectives were not considered at a meeting among HLR leaders to discuss the post. And he was angry because he thought the HLR’s Diversity Committee had a say in whether the post was published, but he and most of the publication’s members didn’t.
In the end, the Law Review did not publish the blog post.
But for Wasserman, the dispute was only the beginning. A committed conservative, Wasserman believed that selection policies that took race and gender into account were discriminatory. For him, the Diversity Committee’s moment of assertiveness was emblematic of what he saw as deeper rot in the Law Review — a tangle of antisemitism, anti-white racism, and rejection of meritocracy.
This spring, those accusations exploded into the open, and the Law Review found itself facing claims that both its article review process and selection of new members were skewed against white male applicants.
When, in April 2025, internal HLR documents began leaking to the Washington Free Beacon, the Law Review’s leaders determined that Wasserman was behind it. When the leaks turned into a flood, the Law Review continued to suspect Wasserman. And when the Justice Department became the third federal agency to launch an investigation into the Law Review, Wasserman was a cooperating witness.
Through interviews with Law Review members and recent graduates, reviews of leaked documents, and several previously unreported internal communications, The Crimson traced how debates within the HLR started long before this spring’s investigations and public uproar.
The same fights — over race, affirmative action, and academic freedom — that put the HLR in the spotlight have played out within the white clapboard walls of Gannett House since at least fall 2023, when the Law Review’s feud over the Israel-Palestine conflict turned into a clash over its own diversity policies.
Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- Pervasive Pattern Of Racial Discrimination At Harvard Law Review (Apr. 28, 2025)
- Trump Administration Investigates Harvard Law Review For Racial Discrimination (Apr. 29, 2025)
- Harvard Law Review Hunts For Leaker Of Racial Discrimination Practices (May 2, 2025)
- Harvard Law Review Asked Prospective Editors To Disclose Their Race Days After It Was Hit With Civil Rights Probes (May 5, 2025)
- Harvard Law Review Forcefully Denies Racial Discrimination Accusations That Sparked Federal Inquiry (May 30, 2025)
- New York Times: Inside Trump’s Attack On The Harvard Law Review (June 3, 2025)
- Harvard Law Review Retaliates Against Former Editor Working In Trump Administration Who Alleged Pervasive Pattern Of Racial Discrimination (June 9, 2025)
- Harvard Law Review Rejects 85% Of Submissions Using Race-Conscious Rubric, Including Article By Asian-American Tax Scholar (June 20, 2025)
- Many Authors Approve Of Harvard Law Review’s Use Of Race And Ideology In Article Selection (June 30, 2025)
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