Author Description

In 2002, Kiwi Camara, a Filipino-American student studying at the Harvard Law School, joined most of his classmates in posting his class outlines for the previous year on the school website. But in his notes, Camara had used shorthand terms widely regarded as racial slurs. In the furor that followed, administrators proposed a speech code to prohibit members of the law school community from voicing racially insensitive remarks. In this fascinating insider’s account, Andrew Peyton Thomas recounts how the school’s intellectual heavyweights—Charles Fried, Alan Dershowitz, Laurence Tribe, Charles Nessen and others—were drawn into open conflict with each other and with the administration. Thomas takes us into the administrative offices, faculty lounges and classrooms, showing that the Camara case is only the latest front in a culture war that has ravaged Harvard Law over the last 25 years.