Columbia Law School Age Discrimination Complaint

TaxProf Blog and Leiter Law School Reports have been covering the complaint by Columbia Law professor, George Fletcher. Very briefly, he alleges that Columbia discriminated against him based on his age by refusing to allow him to teach a required LLM course (Columbia cited poor evaluations), which among other things, might mean that he falls below the required number of teaching hours for the year. Among the other factors that threaten his teaching load is his desire to maintain his tradition of working a full semester in Israel and the fact that the elective course he was assigned to teach is at risk of being cancelled for low enrollment.

I obviously don't know what's really going on here, but I've got to say that the former Academic Affairs Dean in me sees several red flags about his teaching that makes me less inclined to be sympathetic to his claim. That's not to mention the fact that part of the problem is that he expects to be able to leave for half the year, every year.

-Jeff Hirsch