Liberal prof not welcome at UCI

Bowing to pressure from conservatives in the UC Irvine community, university officials rescinded an offer to one of the country’s best-known constitutional law experts to be the first dean of UCI’s Donald Bren School of Law.

Erwin Chemerinsky accepted the university’s job offer Friday, but opposition grew as news spread through the UCI community, university officials said.

On Tuesday, UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake flew to Duke University, where Chemerinsky has taught law since 2004, to tell him the university would withdraw the job offer.

Before becoming a professor at Duke, Chemerinsky taught for 21 years at the USC Law School. In April 2005, Legal Affairs magazine named Chemerinsky one of “the top 20 legal thinkers in America.”

“He met with me yesterday and told me I was too politically controversial,” Chereminsky said from his home in North Carolina. Whether he believes that’s true, Chemerinsky replied light-heartedly, “I believe he believes I’m too politically controversial. He said he didn’t expect the reaction he got from people.”

Drake did not respond to requests for interviews Wednesday, instead issuing a statement through the university’s media relations office.

“Professor Chemerinsky is a gifted academic and his credentials are outstanding,” Drake said in the statement. “My decision is no reflection whatsoever on his qualifications, but I must have complete confidence that the founding dean and I can partner effectively in building our law school.”

Chemerinsky was actively involved in the 2000 presidential recount battle in Florida.

At one point he represented Palm Beach County voters in a court hearing challenging the ballot and he also wrote commentaries criticizing the Supreme Court decision to halt the recount.

More recently he wrote a commentary for The Times criticizing Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, saying their testimony at their confirmation hearings “was a lot of baloney” because “they presented themselves as open-minded jurists lacking an ideological agenda,” but instead have consistently aligned themselves with the high court’s conservative bloc.

Drake knew Chemerinsky was being offered the job Friday, officials said. Yet in the days that followed, critics who feel Cherminsky’s politics are polarizing increased the pressure.

“What you need is an administration that would still stand up to that and say this is the right decision in spite of the opposition,” said John Eastman, who debates Chemerinsky weekly on talk radio and is Chapman University’s dean of law administration.

“Clearly, Chemerinsky is far left of center,” Eastman said. “But the notion that that was somehow news? It should have happened much earlier in the process than it did.

“I have no doubt he would have been welcoming to students and faculty of all political stripes. That’s one of the most important qualities in a dean.

“We were looking forward to putting Orange County on the map more together than either one of us could do singularly,” Eastman said, adding he hoped the two law schools in the county could rival competitive duos as USC and UCLA, or UC Berkeley and Stanford University.

But with that option off the table, Eastman alluded to Chapman’s law school possibly capitalizing on UCI’s rebuff.

“All I’ll say is our relationship is very strong and cordial, and I don’t think it’s out of the question that he’ll be returning to Southern California.”