"Defective On Every Known Scale": Harvard's Janet Halley's Call To Arms

A truly worthy piece in The Harvard Crimson about law prof Janet Halley, and her efforts to install due process in campus sexual assault cases:

...[S]he started to engage with her views on feminism critically and “regard feminism as an alternative, not as a religion,” and she would go on to explore this concept in her scholarship.

Halley described her beliefs in a recent phone interview succinctly: “I'm a leftist, and I'm a crit, but that means for me, hetereosexual men are just as important as lesbian feminists, and I don't care about one identity group more than another. I sympathize with the justice aspirations of all kinds of people,” Halley said.

In September, Halley wrote a critical analysis of Harvard’s new framework, arguing that it was “defective on every known scale of equal procedural treatment of the parties and due process.” Halley sent her analysis to the entire Law School faculty and directly to some of Harvard’s top central administrators—University President Drew G. Faust, University General Counsel Robert W. Iuliano ’83, and University Title IX Officer Mia Karvonides—to begin a dialogue with Massachusetts Hall that would later involve the rest of the Law School faculty.

Halley and 27 other Harvard Law professors published an open letter in the Boston Globe after attempts to make changes internally went nowhere.  Harvard's response was to make carve-outs in Title IX adjudication, but it appears that these will only apply to Harvard Law and not the rest of the university. She takes an obviously controversial stance, as evidenced by a brickbat returned by former Harvard Law students, who felt "pretty betrayed by our former professors". "Dear Colleague" was only an opening volley.