Great Personnel Move by Harvard Law, but Strangely Announced

Harvard Law School posted a notice on its website on August 6 announcing that Bill Rubenstein, a professor at UCLA Law School, has accepted an offer to join the HLS faculty as a tenured professor.  The lengthy notice emphasizes his eminence in the field of civil procedure and class actions, and a very well regarded teacher.  Somewhere down towards the bottom of the announcement (the 6th paragraph) they mention that he worked for the ACLU for a decade doing sexual orientation and AIDS discrimination cases, published the first sexual orientation discrimination casebook, and won an ABA award for a book he co-authored on the rights of HIV-positive people (part of an ACLU paperback series).

I think this is a terrific personnel move by HLS, where the LGBT students lobbied for years to get an openly lesbian or gay faculty member.  Several years ago Janet Halley was recruited for the faculty, but truly openly-gay men have been scarce on the ground at HLS, and Rubenstein fills a real void. 

But I found the announcement to be really strange.  Bill Rubenstein is one of the most prominent openly-gay legal academics in the US, and without taking anything away from his eminence in the field of civil procedure, I think to downplay the gay stuff is really odd.  Bill Rubenstein, in his first appellate argument (before the New York Court of Appeals), won the first legal recognition for same-sex couples as family members in the U.S.   His casebook played a major role in making LGBT legal studies legitimate in the US legal academy.  He played a leadership role in starting a center on LGBT law at UCLA, the first of its kind in the US, which isn't even mentioned in the announcement.

To play this as a big-deal civil procedure appointment by HLS sort of misses the point.  What kind of message are they trying to communicate?

Comments

[Art Leonard]

I sent my congratulations to Bill and by response got an answer to this question. He was actually recruited for the Civil Procedure and class action work where he has been focusing most of his scholarly attention in recent years. So the "incidentalness" of the announcement reflects that nature of his appointment.