Harvard Hires Top GOP Lawyers Amid Legal Battles Over Diversity Policies

Some of the most well-known conservative lawyers are supporting Harvard University’s case against the Trump administration over the way the government frozen billions of dollars in federal funds. Lawyers at the well-known university have worked as law clerks for conservative Supreme Court justices, pushed against COVID-19 restrictions and the Affordable Care Act, and even looked into Joe Biden.

The oldest college in the country filed a 51-page federal complaint against the federal government on Monday, asking for declaratory and injunctive relief. It said that sudden cuts in funding put important medical, military, AI, and other research at great risk, all in an effort to “gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard.”

According to the complaint, the administration sent a letter demanding that Harvard “reform and restructure” its governance to’reduce the power’ of certain students, faculty, and administrators. They also wanted Harvard to hire a “third-party to conduct a ‘audit’ of the viewpoints of Harvard’s student body, faculty, and staff,” hire new faculty, and let in new students in order to achieve “viewpoint diversity” as decided “in the Government’s sole discretion.”

The complaint said, “All in all, the choice that Harvard and other universities face is clear: let the government micromanage your academic institution, or risk the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and new ways of doing things.”

Steven P. Lehotsky, a founding partner at Lehotsky Keller Cohn LLP and an attorney who worked for the university, signed the lawsuit on its behalf. It was Lehotsky’s job to work as a law clerk for both the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

In 2022, Lehotsky and his law partner Scott Keller got the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s rule that workers at companies with 100 or more employees had to be vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 every week. This made headlines.

Keller is another Harvard lawyer who used to work as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was also the Solicitor General of Texas and a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who is currently facing charges. Keller was also one of the lawyers hired by Fox News to defend them in a $1.6 billion defamation suit brought by the voting technology company Dominion because Fox spread false information about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Lawyer William A. Burck of Quinn Emanuel Urquhardt & Sullivan, LLP is also on Harvard’s legal team. He was the lead lawyer in the case against the Affordable Care Act while Barack Obama was president. Burck was special counsel and deputy counsel to George W. Bush at different times. He was also an assistant U.S. attorney in the southern district of New York and helped bring charges against Martha Stewart. He also fought misdemeanor charges of soliciting prostitutes against Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots.

Robert Hur, the former special counsel who was in charge of looking into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents while he was vice president, is one of the most surprising lawyers on Harvard’s bench. He is now representing Harvard in a case against the president who appointed him US Attorney for the District of Maryland in 2017. Hur’s 2024 report finally said that Biden shouldn’t be charged with any crimes. It also warned that it would be hard to get Biden convicted of a felony because juries would see him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a bad memory.”

Hur was Rod Rosenstein’s top assistant when he was Trump’s Deputy Attorney General. He also helped Robert Mueller with his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Hur also worked as a law clerk for Kozinski and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

While responding to Harvard’s lawsuit, the Trump administration said that the “gravy train of federal assistance” to schools like Harvard was coming to an end.

Harrison Fields, a spokesman for the White House, said, “Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege.”