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Harvard Law School Dean of Students Stephen L. Ball condemned a pair of mass emails sent to law students on Friday that accused the Harvard Law Review of discriminating against white authors and urged applicants to falsify their racial and gender identities on application materials.

Ball called both messages “disturbing” and one of them “hateful” in a Saturday email to the HLS student body.

The two mass emails, which were sent Friday evening to more than 180 first-year Law School students and subsequently forwarded to more, came after the Washington Free Beacon released a story that morning alleging anti-white discrimination the Harvard Law Review.

One email advised students applying to the Law Review to claim they belonged to a racial minority, pretend to be gay or transgender, and conceal their identities if they were Asian American or Jewish.

A second email told students to save any personal statements they had submitted or planned to submit to the Law Review because they would be subpoenaed during a planned lawsuit.

The sender of both emails claimed to be from Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences, whose website describes it as a “voluntary membership organization that litigates against race and sex preferences in academia.” FASORP could not be reached for comment.

Ball wrote in his Saturday email that the litigation hold was “not legitimate” but declined to “further spread the messages’ content by repeating it here.”

“HLS is actively investigating all aspects of these communications and appropriate responses,” Ball wrote.

Friday, when the two emails were sent, was the last day of classes at HLS — and three weeks before the Harvard Law Review will select its new members through a writing competition set to occur from May 18 to May 24.

“This latest disturbance comes near the end of a challenging year for many in our community,” Ball wrote in his email. “We are very sorry that you, our students, were not permitted to celebrate the last day of classes free from further difficulties.”

HLS spokesperson Jeff Neal declined to comment but referred The Crimson to Ball’s email. Harvard Law Review president G. Terrell Seabrooks did not respond to a request for comment.

FASORP sued the Harvard Law Review in 2018, claiming that the publication violated anti-discrimination law in its selection of members and articles. The case was dismissed in 2019 after a federal judge ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing because they did not name individuals affected by the alleged discrimination.

Email accounts purporting to belong to FASORP sent a similar message threatening a litigation hold to students at the University of Michigan earlier this month. In 2024, FASORP sued Northwestern University and the Northwestern Law Review, alleging that Northwestern had racially discriminated against white professors, as well as in the selection of articles and members of the Law Review.

FASORP dropped its suit against Northwestern University on January 31, but refiled it just a day later. The case is currently ongoing, but Northwestern is currently seeking attorney fees from FASORP.

The Friday email asking students to retain essay materials stated that FASORP was planning to sue the Law Review and Harvard for “awarding discriminatory preferences to women, non-Asian racial minorities, and homosexual or transgender students.”

The second email to students on Friday set out a list of instructions to students, claiming they would improve Law Review applicants’ chances and “undermine the law-review editors’ efforts to violate the federal- and state-law prohibitions on discriminatory race and sex preferences.”

The email suggested that students take DNA tests to describe their racial background and claim minority status if the test showed that they had a fraction of “minority ancestry.”

It also recommended that applicants claim to be African American “because homo sapiens originated in Africa and later migrated to different continents.”

And it advised students to groom their hair or buy new clothes as if they were beginning a gender transition — then “detransition” after submitting a personal statement.

Both emails were sent just hours after a Free Beacon, a conservative publication, alleged that the Law Review discriminated against white applicants by considering race in choosing its staff, soliciting authors for its foreword, and selecting articles to publish in the Review.

The Free Beacon obtained internal memos in which editors of the Law Review cited writers’ racial backgrounds when deciding whether or not to publish a piece. A Law Review document, published by the Free Beacon, asked editors to note “both substantive and DEI factors” in their memos on submitted articles.

The report had garnered widespread attention online by Friday afternoon and was reposted by Elon Musk on X.

The allegations of racial discrimination and subsequent emails come about two years after the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions practices were unconstitutional.

The share of Black and Hispanic students enrolled into the Law School’s Class of 2027, its first class admitted following the ruling, dropped sharply. The number of Black students enrolled in the first-year class decreased from 43 in the previous year to 19, and the number of Hispanic students fell from 63 to 32 students.

The Trump administration has mounted a sustained campaign against diversity initiatives, adopting expansive interpretations of antidiscrimination laws to allege that all decisions that consider race are discriminatory.

A cast of conservative lawyers, including one from the America First Legal Foundation, is representing FASORP in its suit against Northwestern. The America First Legal Foundation was founded in 2021 by Stephen Miller, a White House advisor who has been a key policy architect for the second Trump administration.

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.

—Staff writer Bradford D. Kimball can be reached at bradford.kimball@thecrimson.com.