Facts, epithets, exams, and anti-racism (Amended)

Above the Law reported about a brewing controversy at UIC-John Marshall involving Prof. Jason Kilborn and his Civ Pro exam.

Kilborn included the following short-answer question on his exam:

After she was fired from her job, Plaintiff sued Employer under federal civil rights law, claiming employment discrimination on the basis of her race and gender. [discussion of other evidence omitted]  Employer also revealed that one of Plaintiff’s former managers might have damaging information about the case, but no one at Employer knew where that former manager was, since she had abruptly quit her job at Employer several months ago and had not been heard from since.  With nothing to go on but the manager’s name, Employer’s lawyer pieced together several scraps of information and concluded that this former manager must be located in a remote area of northern Wisconsin.  Employer’s lawyer spent $25,000 to hire a private investigator, who successfully located the former manager in northern Wisconsin.  Employer’s lawyer traveled to meet the manager, who stated that she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a “n____” and “b____” (profane expressions for African Americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her.

                Later, Plaintiff’s lawyer served [another discovery demand, omitted, and] an interrogatory demanding the identity and location of any person with any information related to the termination of Plaintiff’s employment at Employer or potential discrimination against Plaintiff by Employer or any agent of Employer.

The question asked whether the employer could refuse to disclose the witness's location (while disclosing her name) on grounds of work-product privilege.

The school's BLSA chapter responded with a petition. It calls for, among other things, multiple sections of all mandatory classes (so students can avoid professors such as Kilborn with a "history of bias"), Kilborn's resignation from the academic affairs committee, and an "open dialogue event" with Kilborn. The ATL piece is somewhat sympathetic to Kilborn, surprising, given that site's general rage against professors who use racist language and epithets in class.

Amendment: Kilborn was subject to university sanction--the school placed him on administrative leave, cancelled his new-semester classes and committee assignments, and barred him from campus. There is some uncertainty over the grounds for the university sanction or the process followed; I have deleted comments or speculation from the original post about that process. Regardless, the exam question sparked controversy and triggered a student petition within the school; that raises teaching issues worth thinking about. The post focuses on those.

Please note that I have never met Jason in-person. I know of him from posts to the Civ Pro profs listserv, where he has discussed infusing anti-racism and racial-justice issues into the Civ Pro curriculum. So this is not defending a friend. But I am genuinely curious as to what was wrong with the question. What are the rules, so professors can avoid creating "momentous distraction and cause[ing] unnecessary distress and anxiety" or demonstrating "lack of respect, decency, and civility?"

    • The question did not use explicit and complete epithets, which had been the flashpoint for past controversies over what professors said in class or wrote in materials. ATL has covered those controversies at length, sharply criticizing faculty for mentioning the word. Eugene Volokh and Randall Kennedy present the contrary view, relying on the "use-mention" distinction.

    • Is the rule that bowdlerized reference to epithets is not OK? What if the test had the witness say "n-word," as in "she stated that she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a n-word and c-word"? Are all references to epithets off-limits?

    • Is it only racist epithets, given the focus on "centering race" in the academic discussion? What if the question used a misogynist epithet or anything other than a racist one? What if this question only had the employer calling the plaintiff a "c____" or a "b____"?

    • If bowdlerized use of the word is not OK, is all reference to racist epithets not ok? What if that last sentence of the facts had the witness state "she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, and referred to her with profane expressions for African Americans and women"? Does the reference to the epithet, even this obliquely, cause the same distress and anxiety? Students will be as aware of the "profane expression for African Americans" being referenced as by saying it with ____ or *** or "n-word."

    • If any reference or hint at epithets is not ok, then does it follow that exam questions touching on racist discrimination are off-limits? What if that last sentence of the exam had said the witness "stated that she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, and talked about how much they hated having to employ African-Americans"? The question reveals discriminatory animus without using the word. Of course, the legal issues might come out differently in that case than in an epithet case. If this is problematic, then it seems to eliminate one major litigation area, or at least certain types of cases in that litigation area, as a testing subject; I discussed this issue several years ago.

    • How much does subject matter? The question tested work-product privilege, so the petition argued that the hint at the epithet served no educational purpose. Would the reaction have been different had the question been asked in, say, Employment Discrimination? For what it is worth, a friend who teaches that subject often tests with a fictional religion with fictional stereotypes and fictional epithets. But does that capture the same idea, given the effects of history? It has been decided that this word is the worst in the English language, so bad it cannot be written or spoken or even mentioned. It follows that its use may affect the outcome of a case in a unique way not captured by a fact patter in which someone calls a member of the Church of the Shiny Rock (my friend's actual example) a "Rockette" (I made that one up).

    • This may create unique problems for Civ Pro (and Fed Courts, Evidence, and Civil Rights--basically my entire teaching package). The course material itself is not "sensitive," compared with Con Law or Immigration or Employment Discrimination. But teaching and testing Civ Pro requires that we adopt and use the substantive issues that reach court and must be litigated under the rules we are teaching and testing on. One could argue that there is always another way to test on work-product privilege--use a slip-and-fall tort claim that will not affect anyone's feelings. But one could respond that discrimination claims comprise a substantial piece of the federal docket and it makes no sense to ignore such common claims. Kilborn told ATL that the class casebook uses a lot of employment cases, so that context pervaded the course and made sense as a testing vehicle. And, as I wrote several years ago, the full range of litigation subjects and issues should be fair game.

    • Kilborn also told ATL that the question was designed to illustrate how civil litigation can be used to help women of color overcome the burdens they face in the workplace. And the egregious nature of what the witness reports the employer saying may be relevant to why the employer was so determined not to reveal the witness and why the plaintiff would have a "substantial need" for the information. In other words, just as the precise nature of discriminatory conduct is important "context" in a substantive E/D class, it may provide essential "context" for procedural questions. Given Kilborn's intent, there is great irony that this question has led to these consequences.

Closer to home, I have been watching the litigation in Stallworth v. Nike, a lawsuit by an African American couple alleging that they were subjected to "shopping while Black" in a Santa Monica Nike store and that the SMPD had an agreement with the area stores to arrest or detain anyone on the word of the stores. The complaint runs 50 pages and 200 paragraphs, although without detailed allegations of how Nike and SMPD worked together to create action. The complaint contains pages and paragraphs about the plaintiffs' personal and professional histories, Nike's role in social justice, and last summer's protests; they want to frame the case--likely for consumption by the public rather than the Court--within the broader anti-racism movement. I considered assigning this as one of my in-class pleadings, as an opportunity to discuss the propriety and effectiveness of pleading-as-press release and to analyze the sufficiency of the state-action allegations. I decided against it--partly because it is a long pleading (the other complaints I use are <20 pages) and partly because I could not predict student reactions. There are no racial epithets, but the case touches a raw topic.