🎓DEI or Die: WTF Is Going On at Harvard and Duke Journals?...
Law & Disorder: WTF Is Happening at Elite Law Reviews?
Secret Scoring Rubrics, Racial Gatekeeping, and the Death of Blind Review at Elite Law Schools
By Staff Correspondent | June 2025
👁️🗨️ This Blog uses WTF strictly in the context of: Weird, True & Freaky. Not as profanity. Unless the Ayatollahs start tweeting it.
1.
Welcome to the Harvard Law Woke Review... Err... Harvard Law Review: The Law According to Beyoncé, Now With 70% Less Logic, 100% More Identity Politics!
Harvard DEI Law Review: Where Footnotes Need Diversity Quotas and Citing ‘Too Many Old White Men’ Is Grounds for Rejection
Harvard Law Reviewgate: 500 Memos, Kendrick References, and the Legal Journal That Canceled Merit
By the time you finish reading this, someone at Harvard Law Review will have downvoted a law paper for not quoting enough transgender TikTok scholars.
Welcome to America’s most elite legal journal—where citing Black Twitter gets you fast-tracked to publication and Asian scholars with actual arguments get bounced for looking too “Yale JD.”
The Harvard Law Review, once the gleaming beacon of rigorous legal thought, has apparently decided that jurisprudence is best interpreted through a Kendrick Lamar lyric and an Excel sheet marked “Woke Quota.”
According to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and analyzed by half a gigabyte of WTF-styled auditing, HLR has turned into a DEI-themed escape room—where the only way out is to say the right words, cite the right genders, and hope your footnotes contain enough intersectionality to pass the Rotopool.
Yes, “Rotopool”—which sounds like either a Marvel villain or a gastrointestinal condition—is actually the law review’s anonymous review round.
Unfortunately, nothing stays anonymous when editors start speculating about whether the author “seems Latina” based on her grammar and the Kendrick quote she dropped in the conclusion.
The Rubric That Launched 1,000 Rejections
Let’s start with the “Rubric.” No, not the Marxist intern. The actual document.
Used to screen out 85% of submissions—approximately 2,500 law articles annually—it’s a checklist of “author diversity” points, footnote racial breakdowns, and DEI bonus multipliers. Want a perfect 5/5 rating? Simple. Write less like a lawyer and more like a grievance influencer on TikTok.
The goal: diversity.
The method:
Literary bloodletting.
One paper was rejected because it cited “A LOT of old white men.” Another was approved for citing “predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter.”
In a serious legal forum.
One memo lauded a paper for mentioning Kendrick Lamar in the conclusion.
Another editor proudly observed, “The author cited 20 men, only 9 women, and one non-binary scholar. Unacceptable.”
Law schools used to be places where you learned to write torts. Now you learn to write torments.
Footnote Profiling: The Latest Diversity Weapon
Imagine you're a law student. You spend three months researching complex case law on financial regulation. You footnote it meticulously—only to be rejected because “100% of the cited sources are white.”
Now, instead of Bluebook citations, aspiring lawyers need to attach a Spotify playlist of “Black Women Who Once Took a Con Law Class.”
Apparently, “Footnote Profiling” is a thing. Editors routinely look up who’s being cited in footnotes to ensure proper racial balance. Forget what the authors said—what matters is their skin tone, gender identity, and whether they’ve appeared in a DEI training module.
Identity Quotas Meet Kafka
You’d think the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination. But Harvard’s Law Review seems to believe the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to ensure equal representation in footnotes.
In one instance, a submission by Asian-American scholar Alex Zhang was rejected after an editor argued that there were “too many Yale JDs” and “not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.” The vote to reject? Narrow. The logic? Racist—yet institutionally blessed.
Don’t worry, they weren’t checking a box. They were just being “mindful.” Mindful in the way you are when you fire someone for not being diverse enough. Or when you pass over a candidate with the wrong last name, but “don’t make it weird.”
This is not only racial discrimination. It’s bureaucratized discrimination wrapped in Slack messages, Rubric PDFs, and DEI workshop feedback loops. Kafka, meet Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Kendrick or Kagan?
According to the Harvard Law Review’s new selection criteria, here’s how you get published in 2025:
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Don’t cite too many cishet white males.
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Use the word “Black” at least 9 times—7 won’t cut it.
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Reference Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, or bell hooks (bonus if you do it in a footnote).
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Avoid “binaristic gender frameworks” or risk a DEI demerit.
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Ideally, attend a “Latinas in Legal Academia” workshop so someone can guess your ethnicity and elevate your work post-anonymization.
Forget citing Scalia or Ginsburg—now it’s about how many oppressed identity groups you can squeeze into the footnotes.
As one editor put it: “The article does not promote DEI values. It focuses on partisan gerrymandering, not racial gerrymandering.” Translation: It's too constitutional, not enough Critical Race Theory.
Another article on banking law was faulted for being “dominated by T-14 male scholars.” No note on whether the content was accurate—just that the sources were “too male.”
Maybe next time the authors should cite Cardi B’s opinion on central bank interest rates.
O-Read or Oops?
Even when the process hits the final “O-Read”—the full journal-wide vote—the outcome is determined by a self-selecting activist subgroup. The final publication decisions? Determined by who shows up and who yells the loudest.
And apparently, only 20-50% of editors attend. So, if enough radical left editors arrive with Slack receipts and Kendrick screenshots, your article on 401(k) fiduciary liability is dead on arrival.
Even worse: Slack logs and spreadsheets show editors coordinating votes based on authors’ race and gender. It’s the academic version of jury tampering—except with pronouns.
The DEI Domino Collapse
Let’s not pretend this is just about Harvard. Other top law reviews look up to HLR as the trendsetter. If Harvard ditches merit for DEI Bingo, so will Yale, Stanford, and the rest.
Meanwhile, future lawyers—many of whom will become judges, policymakers, or cabinet appointees—are now trained to prioritize race and gender over substance. And not just trained—they’re incentivized to do so by the institutions they serve.
Want to know why America’s legal system is descending into absurdity? Because somewhere, a transgender TikTok scholar got cited more than the Constitution.
The Bottom Line
Harvard Law Review’s process is no longer about finding the best legal scholarship. It’s about optics, quotas, and checking boxes. It’s about turning legal discourse into a postmodern episode of “Project Runway.”
Judging by the memos, what matters isn’t whether you argued your case well—but whether you’re the right color, cited the right pronouns, and dropped the right rapper reference.
We used to fear the tyranny of the majority. Now it’s the tyranny of the Slack channel.
👁️🗨️ WTF, indeed.
Reader Comments Section:
WokeButConfused82: “Wait, can I get my traffic ticket dismissed by citing Megan Thee Stallion?”
ConLawDad42: “My entire 3L thesis was just rejected because it only said ‘white’ three times. Time to rework it into a Netflix docuseries.”
LegalEagle666: “Remember when ‘law review’ meant reviewing... you know... law?”
T-14 Escapee: “The DEI rubric is like legal TikTok with a thesaurus and a PhD in oppression studies.”
JustSuingNow: “This is going to be Exhibit A in my next discrimination lawsuit. Thanks, Harvard!”
2.
WTF Law Review: Duke’s Diversity Scoring System Revealed, Featuring Secret Rubrics, Affinity Memos, and Casenotes of Color
WTF? Duke Law Journal just got caught playing DEI poker with a marked deck — and only some players got to see the cards.
While Harvard Law Review was busy footnote-counting the race and gender of cited scholars, over at Duke, the competition to become a Law Review editor resembled something out of an affirmative action cabal fan fiction.
Leaked documents reveal that Duke’s journal sent a secret admissions packet — complete with a racial self-insert rubric — exclusively to minority affinity groups. If you were BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, from a marginalized identity constellation, or just willing to trauma-dump in a 500-word essay, you were in luck.
The memo advised applicants from underrepresented backgrounds to explicitly invoke race, gender, or “lived oppression” in their personal statements — and they’d be rewarded with bonus points. Literal, numerical, score-inflating points.
Applicants were told they'd get:
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✅ Up to 10 points for highlighting how their identity helped “promote diverse voices”
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✅ Another 3–5 points for holding any title in an affinity group, like “Latinx Networking Co-chair” or “Pansexual Queer BIPOC Caucus Zine Editor”
This covert packet — obtained by the Washington Free Beacon — included sample statements that read like Dear Diary entries from the Politburo of Oppression Olympics.
One successful applicant wrote:
“As an Asian-American woman and daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges.”
Another leaned hard into trauma performance:
“My first year at Duke Law harkened back to my childhood in a white-majority community where teachers typecasted me as a model student... before I even had the chance to speak.”
Yet another offered:
“As a Latina woman... my skills were always questioned in white, male-dominated fields.”
But here’s the kicker: This rubric was not shared with the general student body. Only “approved” racial affinity groups received it. Everyone else — especially white and Asian students — were left to guess the rules of the DEI Hunger Games.
The Supreme Court Said No. Duke Said: “Hold My Casenote.”
After the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action ruling, it was made clear: no racial quotas, no DEI Trojan horses, no backdoor score boosts based on immutable characteristics.
And yet, Duke created what basically amounts to a Race-Weighted Journal Entry System, wrapped in soothing language like “equity,” “intersectionality,” and “diverse citations.” (Actual rubric category.)
"This is clearly illegal," said David Bernstein, a constitutional law professor. “They’re using the personal statement as a proxy for race. And giving this secret scoring system only to certain groups is straight-up discrimination.”
It gets worse. The leaked packet also contained grading criteria for the casenote competition itself — offering minority students a strategic edge on the writing portion too.
Meet the DEI Architect: Duke’s Editor-in-Chief Has a Stanford Gender Degree and a LinkedIn for Liberation
This entire race-forward initiative was reportedly overseen by Gabriela Nagle Alverio, a gender-studies graduate from Stanford and former “diversity consultant” for a firm that brags about working with Amazon, LinkedIn, and "embedding DEI into corporate culture."
According to her online bio, Alverio is a “political scientist whose passion for inclusion is rooted in the study of power systems.” In 2019, she designed a mandatory diversity curriculum for all Stanford Medical School students.
Basically, Kimberlé Crenshaw with a clipboard.
She declined to comment, but insiders say the whole process — grading, editing, secret memos — was coordinated and “refereed” by Duke Law School administrators. And since the journal operates under Duke’s legal umbrella, it's subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Welcome to the Victimhood Olympics: Where Lived Experience Gets You Published
The secret rubric sparked what one former editor called “a cottage industry of trauma-flexing and oppression storytelling.”
Sample essay themes included:
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“I was the only woman of color in my high school AP Biology class.”
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“I couldn’t speak my truth until Duke Law gave me a diversity caucus.”
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“As a Middle Eastern Jewish woman... I offer an intersectional lens.”
Apparently, “legal scholarship” now means explaining why your race, identity, or “experiential marginalization” makes you a better Bluebook footnote wrangler.
3.
Enter the Trump Administration — Again
Meanwhile, the Harvard Law Review scandal triggered three federal probes, and now Duke may be next.
The Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism just declared Harvard in “violent violation” of Title VI. The same Title VI that Duke’s secret rubric likely violates.
Trump officials have promised to defund and de-accredit any school still operating race-based policies post-SCOTUS. A senior official was quoted as saying, “Duke may continue to operate free of federal privileges… perhaps such an opportunity will spur a commitment to excellence.”
Translation:
“We’re gonna cut your funding unless you stop publishing Kendrick Lamar in your footnotes.”
WTF Is Next?
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Michigan, Northwestern, NYU law journals are all facing lawsuits.
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Columbia is being threatened with loss of accreditation.
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Harvard is in secret talks with Trump’s DOJ to cut a deal.
Law reviews — once the bastions of rigorous, apolitical legal thought — now resemble Tumblr forums moderated by grievance-studies majors with LSAT prep books.
As one former Duke Law editor whispered, “The DEI criteria are so baked in, I can’t remember the last time we selected a piece because it was… you know… legally good.”
Final Note
Legal scholarship is now judged by how “cisnormative” your antitrust analysis is, how “Latinx” your sourcing looks, and how many “nonbinary scholars” you cite. The new legal canon may yet feature opinions penned by Kendrick, footnoted by Cardi, and introduced by trauma TikToks.
So, future law students:
Polish that identity essay.
Your race is now your résumé.
Your trauma is your ticket.
And your footnotes?
They better be diverse.
Or else… no Law Review for you.
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