2-4-6-8: Law School Cannot Litigate

A committee of the Board of Governors at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill actually put the brakes on the law school there. “A UNC system Board of Governors committee said Tuesday the public university system should bar the UNC Chapel Hill law school’s Center for Civil Rights from taking on new clients,” Ray Gronberg reported in the Raleigh News & Observer. “The 5-1 vote with a single abstention set the stage for a final vote by the full Board of Governors next month that the center’s managing attorney, Mark Dorosin, now concedes his organization is likely to lose.”

One board member, real estate developer Marty Kotis, said the move was “simply about reducing the amount of litigation out there.” As you might imagine, the academic establishment at UNC-Chapel Hill and beyond is far less sanguine about the vote.

“Rejecting the recommendations of its Chapel Hill campus chancellor, over 600 law school faculty and administrators, and numerous North Carolinians demonstrating outside, the Educational Planning, Policies and Programs Committee of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Board of Governors voted 5-1, with one abstention, August 1 to bar the UNC Chapel Hill law school’s Center for Civil Rights from taking on new clients, the Raleigh News & Observer reports,” Hank Reichman wrote on the Academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).