Kiwi Alejandro Danao Camara, also known as K.A.D. Camara, is a Filipino American attorney. In 2001, having graduated from Hawaii Pacific University at 16, he matriculated at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 2004. He was also involved in a racial controversy at the school that attracted national attention. He attracted international media attention in 2009 as the pro bonodefense lawyer of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the defendant in the United States' first file-sharing copyright infringement lawsuit brought by major record labels to be tried to a jury.
In his first year at Harvard, Camara was involved in a racial controversy that would gain attention from the national media. Like many students, Camara posted his course outlines to a popular student-run website. Camara's, however, referred to blacks as nigs. For example, to summarize Shelley v. Kraemer, he wrote "Nigs buy land with no nig covenant; Q: Enforceable?" The notes were prefaced with a disclaimer that they may contain racially offensive shorthand.
Upon discovering the outline, classmate Michelle Simpson alerted other students and professors. Camara issued an apology and the outlines were promptly removed, whereupon a third student using the pseudonym "gcrocodile" e-mailed Simpson, expressing disappointment that they were no longer available. The student was later identified as then-1L Mattias Scholl. The section's professor, Charles Nesson, proposed as a didactic solution a classroom mock trial in which he would defend Scholl's right to free speech. The Black Law Student Association at the school took offense and called for a reprimand of the professor, along with another professor, David Rosenberg, who in an unrelated incident allegedly stated that "Feminism, Marxism and the blacks have contributed nothing to the scientific pursuit of legal discourse." Nesson voluntarily withdrew from teaching the torts course, and the law school dean took over for the remainder of the semester. The following year, students protested in favor of more transparency in the selection of the next law school dean and requested a candidate in favor of affirmative action.
In an article in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin covered the incident and found it "striking" that a sequence of "quirky and anomalous events generated such a consensus at the law school-that racial bias was widespread and that immediate corrective action was needed." Law professorCharles Fried described it as a "hysterical, ridiculous overreaction to a couple of unfortunate incidents." The controversy is also the subject of the book The People Vs. Harvard Law: How America's Oldest Law School Turned Its Back on Free Speech and a talk at the New England Appellate Judges’ Conference.
Controversy at Yale in 2005
In 2005, The Yale Law Journal accepted for publication an article co-written by Camara. An anonymous e-mail informed the Law Journal's editors of Camara's course outlines at Harvard and requested that his article not be published. The editors of the Yale Law Journal considered and ultimately decided to publish Camara's article. Some Yale Law students were upset by this decision, and formed a group that held protest activities and an alternative panel on "Disempowered Voices in the Legal Academy" at the same time as Camara's talk. Law school dean Harold Koh was among several dozen students and faculty who walked out of Camara's talk. Before the talk, Camara was aware of the planned protest and told The New York Times that he was happy that the comments had led to "a teaching moment" that was "a more productive thing to do than burning in effigy".
