A group that accused the University of Michigan and its Law Review of discriminating against straight white men has withdrawn its lawsuit.
Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences filed a notice of dismissal on Friday, Oct. 10, with the federal court in Detroit. The two-sentence order noted that the case was being dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning it could be refiled later. It also noted that “each party will bear its own attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses.”
University of Michigan graduates leave the central passageway at the William W. Cook Law Quadrangle on Tuesday, May 20, 2025, after having their graduation pictures taken in the archway where six corbels of past U-M presidents can be found on campus in Ann Arbor.
The Free Press left messages with the lawyers who filed the suit and those who defended it for U-M. When the suit was filed, school officials vowed to vigorously defend against the claims. Online records show no indication of a settlement.
“The University remains steadfast in its commitment to following the law,” spokeswoman Kay Jarvis said in a statement at the time.
One of the law firms that filed the suit, American First Legal was cofounded by Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to President Donald Trump.
FASORP describes itself as a “voluntary, unincorporated, non-profit membership organization formed for the purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia and fights race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.”
The group sued the school in June, claiming that the student-run Law Review used a holistic review committee to “rig the holistic-review process to ensure that the eventual makeup of the incoming Law Review members contains what the committee members regard as a sufficiently ‘diverse’ number of women, non-Asian racial minorities, and homosexual or transgender students.”
In July, the group agreed to drop from the suit named individuals, including school regents and students who worked on the Law Review. That left only the claims against U-M and the Michigan Law Review Association. Those were dismissed on Friday, three days before a deadline for the defendants to respond.
The suit said it was filed on behalf of three straight, white men who are either tenured or tenure-tracked professors at accredited law schools. They claimed their article submissions were rejected by the Law Review. A fourth plaintiff was a straight, white male student entering his second year who had applied for membership on the Law Review staff.
The lawsuit did not name any of those men. Instead, it refered to them as individuals, each of whom is “a white man and is neither homosexual nor transgender.”
The group had sued other schools. In 2018, it filed a similar complaint against the Harvard Law Review and likewise, did not name the individuals claiming the harm. In 2019, the judge in that case cited the lack of names in his decision to dismiss the case.
“The plaintiffs vigorously contend that they need not ‘name names’ in order to establish standing to sue on behalf of their members,” U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin wrote. “It is beyond dispute that such cases explicitly require an association to ‘identify’ a member or members with individual standing, a directive which this court finds obligates the plaintiffs to supply some degree of descriptive information beyond the threadbare recitals excerpted above.”
Contact John Wisely: jwisely@freepress.com. On X: @jwisely
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Group withdraws suit saying U-M discriminates against straight white men
