Remember that old Cher song, “1/32 Breed”?

If Scott Brown wins re-election as a Republican Senator from Massachusetts this fall, he will go on record as one of the luckiest political candidates since, well, Barack Obama. Brown won an upset victory in the special election in 2009 (any time a Republican wins in my home state, it’s an upset) in part because his inept Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, showed herself to be unforgivably ignorant on the one topic most state residents really care about—the Boston Red Sox. Now he has the latest contender for his job, Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren, on the ropes because of her own self-inflicted wound, Warren’s dubious claim of minority status as a Native American between 1986 and 1995.

Warren listed herself as part Native American in the Association of American Law Schools desk book, she says, in the hope of meeting others in her field with similar backgrounds. She did not, she insists, do so to gain any professional edge. Yet in 1992 she was hired to teach at Harvard, and when she became a permanent faculty member in 1995, Warren dropped the minority claim from her profile in the directory. Harvard, meanwhile, began counting Warren as a Native American in its diversity statistics, just as her previous employers had at the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania. Whatever her intent may have been, a former chair of the AALS confirms that minority listings in the organization’s directory were used in hiring decisions by members.“In the old days before the internet, you’d pull out the AALS directory and look up people. There are schools that if they were looking for a minority faculty member, would go to that list and might say, ‘I didn’t know Elizabeth Warren was a minority, ” George Mason University Law professor David Bernstein, a former chairman of the American Association of Law Schools, has told reporters. Continue reading →