…Mr. Damsky’s argument that at least some of the framers meant for the Constitution to apply only to white people is by no means a new one. Evan D. Bernick, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University, notes that the argument can be found in the Ku Klux Klan’s founding organizational documents from the late 1860s.
Among originalists, though, this interpretation has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document.
While Mr. Damsky’s papers were written in a formal style consistent with legal scholarship, his social media posts have been blunt, crass and ugly. A critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, he argued in one post that President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were “controlled by Jews,” whom he called “the common enemy of humanity.” In posts about Guatemalan illegal immigrants, he said that “invaders” should be “done away with by any means necessary.” He lamented the “self-flagellatory mind-set” of modern-day Germans, noting their failure to revere Hitler.
Ms. Grabowski did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Damsky said he assumed that it was the judge who graded his paper. He also said that the judge “is not a white nationalist.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he added. “I would prefer it if he was.”
Students took their complaints to Ms. McAlister, the interim dean. She addressed the granting of the award to Mr. Damsky in at least two town-hall-style meetings, according to an email she wrote to students and an article in The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper. In the February email, the dean wrote that the law school, as a public institution, was bound by the First and 14th Amendments, meaning that no faculty member may “grade down a paper that is otherwise successful simply because he or she disagrees with the ideas the paper advances.”
Institutional neutrality, she wrote in her email, “is not agreement or complicity with the ideas that any community member advances.”
“It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.”
Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights.
If it were a good paper, he said, “you should put aside your moral qualms and give it an A.”
A number of students disagree, but several declined to be interviewed on the record for fear that criticizing the school, or a sitting federal judge, would harm their future job prospects.
One former student, who graduated in May, had his post-graduation job offer rescinded by a large law firm when he told them he had spoken to The New York Times for this article, criticizing Mr. Damsky’s paper and Judge Badalamenti for granting him the award. The student asked not to be identified for fear of jeopardizing other job offers.
Before his suspension, Mr. Damsky had been offered a summer internship in the local prosecutor’s office. But in early April, the prosecutor, Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, rescinded the offer.
“You could imagine,” Mr. Kramer said in an interview, that “having someone in your office who espouses those kinds of beliefs would cause significant mistrust in the fairness of prosecutions.”
Multicultural Meanderings 