More than
1,100 law school professors nationwide oppose Sessions’s nomination as attorney
general
President-elect Donald Trump
announced Friday that he plans to nominate Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as
attorney general. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
A group of
more than 1,100 law school professors from across the country is sending a
letter to Congress on Tuesday urging the Senate to reject the nomination of
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general.
The letter, signed
by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states, is also scheduled to run as a
full-page newspaper ad aimed at members of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
which will be holding confirmation hearings for Sessions on Jan. 10-11.
“We are
convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and
promote justice and equality in the United States,” states the letter, signed
by prominent legal scholars including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School,
Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of
Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at
Irvine School of Law.
The
professors — from every state except North Dakota and Alaska, which has no law
school — highlight the rejection of Sessions’s nomination to a federal
judgeship more than 30 years ago. Robin Walker Sterling of the University of
Denver Sturm College of Law, one of the organizers of the letter, said that
1,000 professors signed on within 72 hours.
“Clearly,
there are many, many law professors who are very uneasy with the prospect of
Attorney General Sessions, and they are willing to take a public stand in
opposition to his nomination,” she said.
The career of Jeff Sessions,
President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general, has been shadowed
by his prosecution of the "Marion Three." Sessions brought forth the
voter fraud case as a U.S. attorney in 1985, and his critics alleged the
charges to be racially motivated.(Video: Dalton Bennett/Photo: Dalton
Bennett/The Washington Post)
The law professors wrote that some
of them have concerns about Sessions’s prosecution of three civil
rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama in 1985, his support for building a
wall along the nation’s southern border and his “repeated opposition to
legislative efforts to promote the rights of women and members of the LGBTQ
community.”
“Nothing in
Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986,” the letter states, “has convinced us
that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too
racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.”
Sessions’s
former chief counsel William Smith, who is African American, has said that
people who call Sessions racially insensitive are “just lying. And they should
stop the smear campaign.”
“The people
making these allegations against Senator Sessions don’t know him,” Smith said
in an interview. “In the last 30 years, they probably haven’t spent 10 hours
with him. I spent 10 years working with him . . . as his top
legal adviser. There are not statements that he made that are inappropriate.”
Allegations of racial insensitivity were
made against Sessions at a 1986 Senate hearing when he was nominated by
President Ronald Reagan to be a federal judge. His nomination was defeated
after being opposed by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, People for
the American Way and the NAACP, which is now protesting his nomination for
attorney general, calling it “despicable and unacceptable.”
Supporters
of Sessions note that his nomination has been endorsed by Gerald A. Reynolds, a
former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In a letter to the
Judiciary Committee’s highest-ranking Republican and Democrat, Reynolds, who is
African American, said, “Sessions is a man of great character and integrity
with a commitment to fairness and equal justice under the law.”
w Photos
More than 100 former U.S. attorneys
who served under Democratic and Republican presidents have written to the Senate in support of
his confirmation.
Sarah
Flores, a spokeswoman for Sessions, said Friday in response to the NAACP
statement that Sessions “has dedicated his career to upholding the rule of law,
ensuring public safety and prosecuting government corruption.”
“Many
African-American leaders who’ve known him for decades attest to this and have
welcomed his nomination to be the next Attorney General,” Flores’s statement
said. “These false portrayals of Senator Sessions will fail as tired, recycled,
hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited. From the
Fraternal Order of Police and the National Sheriffs’ Association to civil
rights leaders and African-American elected officials, to victims’ rights
organizations, Senator Sessions has inspired confidence from people across the
country that he will return the Department of Justice to an agency the American
people can be proud of once again.”
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Sari Horwitz covers the Justice
Department and criminal justice issues nationwide for The Washington Post,
where she has been a reporter for 30 years.
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