Chronicle of Higher Education, An Outspoken Professor Criticized His University and His Field. Now He’s Suing for Discrimination.:

A longtime law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is also a prolific critic of legal education is suing the institution, saying it is discriminating against him because he is Latino.

Paul F. Campos alleges that Boulder’s law school has failed to offer an explanation or recourse for a poor evaluation he received last year, and his complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado stakes that treatment on his ethnicity. Campos has also been an outspoken critic of the legal-education industry and specifically of what he characterized in his lawsuit as the Boulder law school’s “reckless financial behavior,” which he says has made him “quite unpopular” with colleagues.

To Campos, who has written for The Chronicle, the retaliation he claims to have faced in recent years reflects a decade spent criticizing legal education from the inside, including on a blog he wrote from 2011 to 2015 called Inside the Law School Scam, and pointing out in faculty meetings what he saw as financial mismanagement at his home institution.

That Campos is Latino only expands the “target on my back,” he told The Chronicle. “If you are a whistleblower, naturally it makes you unpopular in a variety of ways. But if you’re nonwhite and also a whistleblower, that’s kind of two strikes against you,” Campos said. “I think my own experience indicates the extent to which my white colleagues are willing to put up with criticism about the basic finances of the institution from a nonwhite colleague. And the answer is they’re pretty much not.”

But others say Campos’s history of disparaging his industry and his own institution has damaged his reputation and, in turn, made his lawsuit difficult to take seriously. …

Among those leery of Campos’s lawsuit is Brian Leiter, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago and a frequent commentator on law-school happenings. In a post on his own blog Monday, Leiter called Campos’s discrimination claims “weak” and his allegations of retaliation “not much stronger.” The former, he said, are undercut by the fact that Inniss is Black and the law school’s previous dean was Native American.

“But the real question,” he told The Chronicle, “is whether there is a nondiscriminatory explanation for how the school is treating him. It seems to me there’s a pretty obvious one, which is that he’s not doing a lot of legal scholarship.” Instead, Leiter said, Campos has published books on obesity and the experience of being a sports fan.

“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of law professors who have a favorable impression of him,” Leiter said of Campos. “The general view is he’s kind of opportunistic. He likes to be in the limelight, he likes to be in the newspapers, he likes to attract attention to himself.”

• Above the Law, Law School Professor Sues School After What Sounds Like A Whole Lot Of Retaliation
• Paul Campos (Colorado), Why I’m Suing the University of Colorado:
• Law.com, Law Professor Sues Univ. of Colorado, Law Dean Alleging Discrimination and Retaliation
• Brian Leiter (Chicago), Paul Campos Sues the University of Colorado at Boulder Law School For Discrimination and Retaliation
• Reuters, Law Professor Sues University of Colorado Over Discrimination Claims

See also Twitter: Derek Muller (Iowa) (here) and Orin Kerr (UC-Berkeley) (here, here, and here).