A Hot Week For the Law School

The issue of alleged discrimination in law firm hiring drew a flurry of response at the Law School this week. Both administrators and minority law student groups took action after a black Law School student charged that a law firm recruiter made "racially offensive" remarks to her during a job interview last fall.

Frustrated by Law School Dean Albert M. Sacks's delay in fulfilling a two-month-old promise to name an investigator in the case, a coalition of student groups this week submitted a proposal to a Visiting Committee of the Board of Overseers.

That proposal would restructure the Law School Placement Committee to make it more responsive to discrimination complaints.

The proposal calls for a placement monitoring committee to actively encourage informal discrimination charges and to counsel law firm recruiters about potentially discriminatory hiring activities.

In addition, the national convention of the Black Law Students Association, in Washington, D.C., last week passed a resolution sponsored by the Harvard chapter, urging the law association's chapters to investigate discrimination charges in their respective law schools and to report their findings in the national newsletter.

Both these actions came largely in response to the case of Gail E. Bowman, a black third-year Law School student, who charged a recruiter, John H. Morrison of the selective Chicago firm of Kirkland and Ellis, with telling her, among other offensive remarks, that "the last black to leave (the firm) went to Clorox...isn't that funny, a black man going to work for a bleach company?"

But as the student coalition and the Law School Council prepared to confront the visiting committees with charges of administrative stalling in the Bowman case and others like it, Sacks finally named the promised outside investigator--Robert A. Gorman '58, a University of Pennsylvania law professor.

Yesterday, however, the uproar over discrimination had anything but died down. As a sub-committee of the Board of Overseers met to hear statements of Law School placement procedures, more than 100 students jammed the meeting room to show their support for the coalition's restructuring proposal.

In the meeting, Victor Brudney, professor of Law and chairman of the placement committee, defended a recent committee decision to pursue discrimination charges through administrative channels. Student leaders, through, are demanding that committees made up only of students be allowed to monitor grievance inquiries.