The Harvard Law Review is awarding a $65,000 fellowship meant to serve “the public interest” to Ibrahim Bharmal, the Harvard Law School student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate, according to a new report.
Bharmal is one of this year’s recipients of the Harvard Law Review Fellowship, Ira Stoll of The Editors reported. The program supports “recent Harvard Law School graduates”—Bharmal is set to graduate this month—with “a demonstrated interest in serving the public interest through their work and scholarship.” It comes with a $65,000 stipend that funds each fellow’s work “in a public-interest related role at a government agency or nonprofit organization.” For Bharmal, that work will come at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Los Angeles office, according to Stoll.
The move comes at a tumultuous time for both the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Law School. The Trump administration is probing both entities over internal documents, first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, that show editors at Harvard Law Review use race to select both editors and articles for publication. At least one private attorney, former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, plans to sue the journal over the practice, ordering its editors on Friday to preserve documents that he plans to subpoena.
The law review claims to be separate from the law school, something a spokesman for Harvard, Jeff Neal, emphasized in a statement to the Free Beacon. The fellowship could undercut those claims. A Free Beacon review found that Harvard’s database for grant and fellowship opportunities, known as CARAT, advertises the fellowship. That advertisement states that a “committee of Harvard Law School and Harvard Law Review alumni in public interest careers chooses finalists from the set of applicants, and a faculty committee interviews the finalists to select fellows,” indicating Harvard faculty members signed off on Bharmal as a recipient.
Hellbound and Down 