"There was no one even conversant with CriticalLegal Studies on the ad hoc committee," she said.
Peters was the only member of the committee whocommented on the case. In a public statement thejudge said that she had recommended to Bok thatDalton not be reinstated to the faculty.
Peters refused to elaborate on her comments.Cox refused any comment. The other three committeemembers could not be reached yesterday.
In explaining the purpose of the committeereview, Bok said he thought the role of an outsideexamination is to assess academic merit, as if thecase had never been considered. "The committeeconducted its deliberations, and I arrived at mydecision without regard to the faculty vote oflast spring," he wrote in a press statement.
According to Dalton supporters, Bok's decisionto conduct the review in this way has left claimsof discrimination--which prompted the request fora review--unaddressed.
Law School Dean James Vorenberg '49 saidyesterday that Bok had made clear that he woulduse his review to determine whether Daltondeserved to receive tenure, not whether the LawSchool tenure process is flawed.
But Dalton's lawyer Nancy Gertner said that thedistinction between the two roles is an artificialone. "We're not talking about intergalacticstandards for tenure. We're asking 'Did she meetthe standards for tenure at Harvard Law School inthat year?'" Gertner said.
"Whether Clare Dalton deserved tenure isinextricably intertwined with what standards hadbeen imposed on men," she said. "It's impossibleto consider the question without looking at thediscrimination question."
The allegations of discrimination andpolitically-biased tenure votes in Dalton's caserepresent the latest in a series of politicalbattles between adherent of CLS and theiropponents, which have been fought in the tenurearena.
The other assistant professor to be deniedtenure in recent memory, Daniel K. Tarullo, andthe two visiting professors who have been deniedtenure in the past three years have all beenadherents of CLS.
The latest of the visiting professors,Wisconsin Law School Professor David Trubek, wasgranted tenure by the faculty last spring, but hisappointment was reversed by Bok after a minorityof opponents charged that the scholar was tenuredfor political reasons. The decision representedthe first time that a president had reversed thevote of the law faculty in recent memory.
Bok's decision to intervene in Trubek's casewas the first implementation of a policy,announced in 1985, that called for the presidentto intervene in Law School tenure cases if therewere charges of polical bias.
Opponents of CLS used this policy successfullyto convince Bok to review the Trubek case, andsupporters of the movement used the same tactic toask for Bok's second look at the Dalton case.
Dalton is scheduled to teach at NortheasternLaw School in Boston in the fall, where she wasoffered a position this fall pending the result ofBok's review.