The Trump administration is not fond of anything that might be classified as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy. In 2025, the administration opened two investigations into Harvard University and the Harvard Law Review over allegedly factoring race into article selection decisions of the law review.

Whatever the investigation finds, it is unquestionably the case that the Harvard Law Review embraced an affirmative action plan decades ago and that it evolved in a variety of ways. Standard Deviations: The Origins of Affirmative Action at the Harvard Law Review by Professor Christopher David Ruiz Cameron is the first law review article documenting the history of affirmative action and its evolution into DEI at the Harvard Law Review (HLR). The Article situates HLR’s controversial adoption of race-conscious membership criteria in 1980s between two other sets of historical events: the American legal education reform movement and the rise of the student-edited law review in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the decline of affirmative action and the subsequent attack on DEI by the Trump Administration in the early 21st century.

Professor Cameron and I were editors when the Harvard Law Review adopted its first affirmative action plan. As ably laid out on the article, the adoption process was memorable.