How the DEI Sausage Gets Made at Berkeley Law

The Washington Free Beacon has a story up today about how UC Berkeley's Law Review journal hired people for its Holistic Review Committee. The Holistic Review Committee was basically the hiring committee made up of eight people who would then decide which students would be selected to work at the journal.

It seems the key to getting this job on the review committee was a promise to help diversify the law review by looking at things other than the usual metrics of academic success. Looking at the applications for these positions over the past three years, the Free Beacon found the goal was to put DEI first without admitting to any racial discrimination against people who had better academic records. Here's how one applicant for the Holistic Review Committee explained how she'd done the same work at Politico as a hiring manager there.

When Maya Parthasarathy...applied for the journal's admissions committee in 2025, she knew exactly what her colleagues wanted to hear.

A former deputy at Politico, where she oversaw the hiring of entry-level journalists, Parthasarathy explained how her experience in media would help her promote "diversity, equity, and inclusion" at the University of California, Berkeley's flagship law journal, which selects eight editors each year to evaluate candidates for the law review.

"When I first joined [Politico], I realized that the newsroom lacked the diversity necessary to reduce bias and improve our content," Parthasarathy wrote in her application to the admissions committee. To fix the problem, she said, her team at Politico "did not consider grades," instead creating a "holistic" review process that included, among other things, an editing test.

"For candidates on the borderline of a passing score on our test, we considered strengths they showed in other parts of their applications, and experiences they would bring to the table," Parthasarathy said. "At the end of my tenure at Politico, our team had grown from just one person of color — me — to fifty percent hires from underrepresented backgrounds."

Politico had an editing test for new hires but the woman in charge of hiring "did not consider grades." Instead, she looked at "candidates on the borderline of passing" and considered what "experiences" they would bring to the table. In other words, she considered "lived experience" as a minority applicant more valuable than the ability to pass the test. And as a result of this process, she hired a lot more minority applicants at Politico. Now she was promising to do the same at the Berkeley law review journal.

So this is how the DEI sausage gets made at Berkeley Law. You hire people whose chief skill is setting aside academic achievement in favor of a specific, more equitable outcome. You do that by first assuming that outcome is best for everyone (except the kids with more academic achievement who were white or Asian) and by suggesting those white and Asian kids only got better test scores because the system was racist.

The Free Beacon reviewed 14 applications for the committee submitted between 2023 and 2026, as well as internal announcements showing which applications had been successful. The documents offer a window into how editors at a top law review—UC Berkeley School of Law was ranked 16th by U.S. News and World Report this year and its law review is among the top 10 in various rankings—are using personal statements to bypass bans on affirmative action, giving race as much weight or more than what one former committee member, Clemencia Garcia-Kasimirowski, dubbed "seemingly 'objective'" standards.

"I am very passionate about being part of the Holistic Review Committee because it shows that CLR is committed to approaching an inequitable process through an equitable lens," Garcia-Kasimirowski wrote in her 2024 application to the committee. "This process not only takes a concrete step towards making CLR a more equitable journal, but we all know that a more diverse group of students in the CLR room makes us better, both substantively and through community."

Garcia-Kasimirowski also said that "standardized testing … was created by a eugenicist" and that "large lectures … have been proven to disadvantage people of color."

These people actually believe that standardized tests, tests where everyone gets the same questions, are racist. They believe this because the outcomes of these tests are not equitable by race. Over and over, Asian students outperform everyone else as a group followed by white students, Hispanic students and black students in that order. So the solution is either to get rid of the test entirely, as many schools did, or to create a "holistic review" that allows the reviewers to sidestep the results of standardized tests in favor of whatever other factors will allow them to come up with a more equitable outcome. All of the people who applied for positions on the review committee seem to have understood the assignment.

At least two separate editors said they wanted to join the committee so that they could give a boost to Native American applicants. Mackenzie Gettel, now an associate at Jenner & Block, wrote in her 2024 application that the "Holistic Review Committee will enhance my ability to uplift Native women whose voices are otherwise silenced by the inaccessibility of the law."

Of course promising to select the Native American applicant means that some kid with better scores and demonstrated ability has no chance because diversity trumps merit. If you're a white or Asian student, you can't work hard enough to overcome the need of the review committee to select the minority applicants to make the stats look good. It's a rigged game, though if asked by the EEOC all of these people would deny it. 

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