When the Washington Free Beacon published documents showing how the Harvard Law Review selects articles based on race, the law review insisted those documents had been taken out of context.

The journal claimed the Free Beacon had quoted “selectively” from “five internal memos going back more than three years,” adding that the Harvard Law Review “considers several thousand submissions annually.”

“The Review does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication,” the journal wrote in a fact sheet published on May 27.

But according to new documents obtained by the Free Beacon, the law review eliminates more than 85 percent of submissions using a rubric that asks about “author diversity.” And 40 percent of journal editors have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained in a meeting that “we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors.”

“We shouldn’t be checking a box,” the editor added. “Just something to be mindful of.”

The exchange took place on March 13—months after the Trump administration had ordered schools to end racial preferences—and was chronicled in meeting minutes from the law review’s articles committee, a 10-person body that screens out the vast majority of submissions. Zhang’s piece was voted down narrowly.

The law review has said that it vets articles based solely on “their quality and contribution to legal scholarship.” But in at least 87 cases identified by the Free Beacon—including 75 from the volume published last year alone—the journal considered protected traits or encouraged its members to do so.

Editors complained that a piece had cited “A LOT of old white men,” attempted to guess whether a scholar was “Latina,” complained that an author was “not from an underrepresented background,” and praised an article for citing “predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter.”

Another article was recommended, in part, because “it cites a Kendrick song in the Conclusion!”

The Free Beacon obtained more than 500 documents from the journal’s two latest volumes, including the one currently in production. The new documents are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at universities—and span four distinct stages of the article selection process. They provide the most comprehensive picture yet of the racial and ideological preferences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Harvard and is now the subject of three federal probes.

The documents show that at least 42 different editors considered race or gender when making recommendations in 2024. That number accounts for 40 percent of the 104 editors who serve on the journal at any given time, all of whom have a vote in publication decisions.

While some editors recommended pieces on the grounds that the author was a minority, others paid more attention to the article’s footnotes, combing through the citations to see how many sources were white, black, or transgender.

“The author cited 20 men by name,” Leah Smith, who graduated Harvard Law School in May, wrote of one article, but only “9 women and 1 non-binary scholar.”

The new documents include the rubric used to screen out submissions at the start of the process, which recommends “expediting” pieces that could advance diversity. They also include every memo that editors wrote in 2024 about the articles that survived that screen, according to a source who provided those memos.

The Free Beacon reviewed all of the 2024 memos—461 in total—to determine how many of them made recommendations based on race or gender. It found 61 cases in which editors discussed the race or gender of the sources cited, and another six in which they discussed the race or gender of the authors themselves. That number does not include eight additional cases in which editors discussed an author’s protected traits in Slack messages and spreadsheets. Nor does it include the dozens of edge cases in which editors mentioned diversity but were ambiguous about what they meant by it.

The Free Beacon also found numerous examples of articles that were penalized because they did not do enough to promote “DEI values,” with one editor dinging a piece for only using the word “Black” seven times.

“Two of those are not referring to the racial category,” Smith said of the article, which had opened by describing the death of a 25-year-old black man at the hands of the police. “I do not think it is acceptable for us to publish an article reckoning with the criminal legal system and police violence that so flimsily engages with race.”

Another editor, Jennifer West, complained that a feminist analysis of antitrust law had not addressed “racial disparities in economic power” or discussed the experiences of transgender people, adding that “the DEI values advanced by the piece are limited.”

“Despite occasional references to the ‘cisgendered’ and ‘heterosexual’ power-brokers and power structures that dominate in our contemporary era … the article advances a binaristic conception of gender that does not reflect contemporary understandings of gender diversity,” she wrote.

Smith and West did not respond to requests for comment.

The Trump administration has launched three probes of the law review based on around two dozen documents the Free Beacon has published since April, most of them from the second and third stages of the article selection process. It’s the first stage, though, where the bulk of submissions are cut.

Each piece is randomly assigned to 1 of 10 articles editors, who rates it on a 1-5 scale. The rubric meant to guide those ratings—which determine what pieces will advance to the second stage—suggests giving articles a 5.0, the highest score, if they will increase “author diversity.”

The rubric adds that “we should consider expediting” such pieces. That provision appears to contradict a claim made in the journal’s May 27 factsheet, which states that the law review “does not expedite the consideration of articles based on an author’s race, ethnicity, gender, or other protected characteristic.”

The journal receives approximately 3,000 submissions every year, according to an internal presentation. Just 412 of those submissions—or 14 percent—made it past the initial screen in 2024.

The numbers imply that 86 percent of pieces were eliminated using the race-conscious rubric, which was distributed to new articles editors in February as part of their orientation, according to a person familiar with the matter. Earlier drafts of the rubric suggest it has been in use since at least 2023.

As of this writing, authors are encouraged to provide their race and gender on the law review’s online submissions form, information that is shown to articles editors at least twice during the screening process, according to screenshots obtained by the Free Beacon.

Harvard Law Review president G. Terrell Seabrooks did not respond to a request for comment.

Once the articles committee has whittled down the stack, each remaining piece is anonymized and assigned to one of the law review’s 104 editors, a process known as the “Rotopool.” The editor writes an analysis of the piece using a predetermined rubric, which, until July 2024, asked whether the article cites “diverse voices,” including those from “underrepresented groups.”

While many memos left that section blank or used it to discuss other forms of diversity, dozens of editors appear to have scanned the citations for signs of racial balance, going so far as to look up the footnoted scholars to see if the piece cited too many white men.

“From quick searches, the author primarily cites T-14, male scholars who do not appear to be from underrepresented groups,” one editor wrote of an article on banking law. “Financial regulation is not known for its diversity…”

Another editor wrote that the question about citations was “non-sensical [sic]” but proceeded to answer it anyway, complaining that an article “cites like, maybe, 8 people,” and “100% of them are white.”

The Rotopool rubric also asks whether the article’s content “can help promote DEI values.” In 2024, the vast majority of editors answered that question, often evaluating pieces based on how much they discussed race and gender.

“The Article briefly mentions racial gerrymandering, but its primary focus is on partisan gerrymandering,” one editor wrote. “As such, it does not directly address an issue or provide a solution that promotes DEI values.”

Though the articles at this stage are anonymized, that didn’t stop one editor, Ben Weinberg, from attempting to guess an author’s race and gender. “If my guess about the author is correct,” Weinberg wrote, “it’s worth noting that she herself is a Latina professor” who “workshopped this article at a conference specifically for Latinas in legal academia.” Weinberg did not respond to a request for comment.

After the anonymized drafts have been reviewed, the top 50 or so are unblinded and sent back to the articles committee. There they receive another, deeper read by an articles editor who writes a detailed memo, known as the “M-Read,” on the pros and cons of each piece.

Five of the 49 M-Reads written in 2024 explicitly mentioned the author’s race or gender. “This author is not from an underrepresented background,” editor Riya Sood wrote in the “negatives” section of one memo, which the Free Beacon reported in April.

Another editor, Tashrima Hossain, recommended two pieces on the grounds that their authors were women, noting their gender as a “positive” in a pair of previously unreported memos.

“[I]t [sic] would be remiss if I did not mention the opportunity to elevate a female scholar from a non-T14 school earlier in her career,” one of the memos said.

Sood and Hossain did not respond to requests for comment.

Articles that make it past M-Reads are debated by the entire articles committee, which votes on whether to advance them to a journal-wide vote. The Free Beacon was not able to obtain meeting minutes from the committee’s 2024 deliberations. It did, however, obtain minutes from the March 13 meeting where Zhang’s piece was axed, which included a heated debate about how, if at all, race should be considered in the selection process.

“We’ve already sent a lot of diverse authorship pieces [forward] and they’ve been failed,” one editor said.

Zhang, who has published scholarship on the taxing powers of native tribes, did not respond to a request for comment.

The final stage of the process is a journal-wide meeting that every editor can attend. At that meeting, known as the “O-Read,” editors debate and vote on each piece that has made it past the articles committee.

Only 20 to 50 percent of editors typically attend those meetings, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon, and votes are determined by the majority of those in attendance, not the majority of the masthead. The system means that the most politically engaged editors are often overrepresented in the final tally, according to one former editor, who described O-Reads as a face-off between “the radical left and the Federalist Society.”

“The radical left usually wins,” the editor added.

Even if all 104 editors voted, 42 of those votes—or 40 percent—would be cast by editors who put race- and gender-based recommendations in writing.

The 500 new documents do not include the dozens of emails, spreadsheets, and Slack messages that triggered the Trump administration’s probes, such as a 2024 spreadsheet that advocated for scholars based on race and gender. They also do not include the evidence that the law review uses race to select editors as well as articles, or the evidence that it retaliated against an editor who allegedly leaked documents to the Free Beacon.

Though the law review has insisted that it is separate from Harvard Law School, the government is exploring whether they are functionally the same entity.

The Free Beacon manually reviewed each of the internal memos it obtained. It also used an artificial intelligence program developed by DeepAudit, an AI start-up that uses machine learning to identify DEI language, to expedite the review. All of the AI’s findings were double checked by hand.

In the interest of transparency, the Free Beacon is publishing every memo from 2024 that was analyzed as part of its review. You can read them here.

For a list of all the race- and gender-based decision-making the Free Beacon has uncovered, see this link.

Jessica Schwalb contributed to this report.

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