LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: “Our Job is to Teach the Children, Not be the Children:” UVA lawprof Xiao Wang exposes immature and unprofessional behavior by his colleagues.

Professor Xiao Wang, director of University of Virginia’s Supreme Court Clinic, litigated the case of Ames v. Ohio Youth Services. The thrust of the case was quite simple, and intuitively appealing: Heterosexual employees alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation have the same burdens as homosexual employees alleging such discrimination. Such symmetry is built into our antidiscrimination laws, which is why the laws ban discrimination based on “race” or “sex” or “sexual orientation” and not “against people of color” or “women” or “people who identify as LQBTQ.” Not surprisingly, the Court reasserted this principle in a unanimous opinion.

While the case was pending, however, Wang and his students were subjected to a campaign of harassment by some of his faculty colleagues and other students. You can watch a video of him recounted what transpired, and inspired the title of this blog post, here.

Good for him for calling them out. With a quibble that law students are not children. They may act like them sometimes, but no more often than a good chunk of the faculty, these days.