Now Trending: White Supremacist Legal Scholarship

An avowed Nazi won an academic award for his work advocating white supremacy at the University of Florida. Is this the bold, new direction of legal academia?

Flag of the American Nazi party (Wikipedia)

I KNOW IT’S COOL TO BE A WHITE NATIONALIST these days, but I didn’t expect that an accredited, mainstream law school would be handing out laurels to an avowed bigot.

Yet, that’s what happened at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where Preston Damsky, a rising 3-L, won an award for his paper arguing that the phrase, “We the People,” applies exclusively to white Americans. He wrote the paper last fall for a class on originalism taught by Trump-appointed judge John Badalamenti, who picked him for the prize.

Damsky’s paper wasn’t just a dry legal exegesis of what the founding fathers intended but a spirited call to action. According to The New York Times, his paper advocated for the elimination of voting rights for nonwhites, asserted that “aliens remain second-class persons under the Constitution,” and called for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.” To top it off, he wrote chillingly that white people “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

Still not sure this guy is a bona fide racist? Well, Damsky proudly proclaims he is. He told the Times that calling him a Nazi “would not be manifestly wrong.”

But let’s be clear that Damsky can say or write whatever he wants, however repugnant. That’s First Amendment 101. It should also be obvious that his professor is free to give Damsky the prize and sing his praises to the sky. That’s academic freedom.

Yet there’s something foul about a law professor (a federal judge, no less) giving props and legitimacy to the racist rants of a proud bigot. It’s hard to imagine that this would have been acceptable a year ago or so. But is that where legal academia is heading these days?

But maybe I’m not giving Damsky enough of the benefit of a doubt. Perhaps he wrote an absolutely amazing paper. Perhaps his argument for apartheid in this country was so insightful, creative and groundbreaking that most professors in Judge Badalamenti’s shoes would feel compelled to give him the top honor. Perhaps he’s the Lawrence Tribe of the extreme far right.

Stanford Law School professor Ralph Richard Banks doesn’t seem convinced.