FASTORP Abandons Lawsuit Alleging Bias Against White Men in Chicago Law Review Selection

A Correction on a Recent Legal Challenge

There has been some misunderstanding especially in the context of abandoning a case by reports concerning a lawsuit against the University of Chicago Law Review. The organization that has been at the heart of these court struggles, Faculty, Alumni and Students against Racial Preferences (FASTORP), has actually been on the offensive of law school suing. Nevertheless, the suit just abruptly and abruptly dismissed was not against the University of Chicago, but against the Michigan Law Review.

FASTORP is a conservative group that has initiated a campaign of judicial litigation against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. The organization, known as America First Legal, and led by the former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has already initiated a number of such lawsuits. The gist of all these cases is that the reviews of the laws are being discriminative against the white and heterosexual males.

The dropped case was opened in June 2025 in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan. It was aimed at the University of Michigan Law School Michigan Law Review Association. Only a few months later (on October 10, 2025) the whole case was voluntarily dismissed by FASTORP. Such a drastic turnaround has become a big news, since this has been a sudden termination of one of its marquee legal battles.

The issue with the misunderstanding with Chicago is probably due to another lawsuit that is going on. Very similar complaint was filed in the federal court in Chicago in July 2024 by FASTORP. Nevertheless, the University of Chicago is not the defendant of this lawsuit. It is addressed to Northwestern University, its law school and the student editors of the Northwestern University Law Review. At the beginning of 2025, that case is still open.

The Core Allegations of the Lawsuits

FASTORP claims in its numerous grievances that law school journals are practicing unlawful discrimination. These journals are accused in the lawsuits of transgressing the Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded programs, and the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based discrimination. The general argument here is that diversity policies are a pool of corruption and lawlessness that negatively affect qualified white men applicants.

These lawsuits are specifically on the selection of the student members and published articles. FASTORP asserts that the reviews of laws in their attempt to increase diversity provide illegal preference to women and racial minorities. The complaints claim that these journals choose candidates of desirable qualities rather than white men whose credentials might be superior, in which case they have higher grades or writing competitions.

In the case of membership, most law reviews choose some of their members through a grading system and writing contest. But also, most have a holistic approach to review the remaining vacancies. FASTORP contends that this holistic review which possibly gives applicants an option to write personal statements regarding their background cover illegal race and sex preference.

There is also the group that questions the process of selecting the articles. FASTORP asserts that the white male members of the faculty are willing and capable of submitting their work but are underprivileged. These lawsuits accuse the law review editors of favoring articles authored by writers who belong to underrepresented groups, a fact that FASTORP purports to be direct discrimination against its members.

A History of Legal Hurdles

There have been great barriers to the legal campaign by FASTORP and this is perhaps one of the reasons why the Michigan case has been dropped. The group has not been new to this type of strategy of suing student-run law journals. In 2018, FASTORP also brought almost the same lawsuits against the law reviews at Harvard University and New York University (NYU). These two previous cases had been unsuccessful.

Federal judges ruled against lawsuits in both cases of Harvard and NYU. The essence behind the dismissals was that FASTORP did not demonstrate standing to sue. This is an essential legal provision whereby a plaintiff should convince the court that he or she has suffered a direct, concrete, and personal injury due to the acts of the defendant.

These courts decided that FASTORP had failed to point out a single one of its members who had indeed been refused a place on the law reviews, or had been rejected on an article due to these diversity policies. The judges held that the claims of future harm by the group could not be too speculative. The group did not have the legal right to take the case without a specific victim that was directly harmed.

This record of dismissals based on the lack of standing was probably a factor in the Michigan suit. According to the legal experts, the same underlying challenge was possibly experienced by the group. By dismissing the case at its own will, FASTORP will also evade an adverse decision, which would set a bad precedent in the other cases that it is still running such as the one that it has against Northwestern.