I’m following this story closely.  The law blog of the Wall Street Journal has the latest.

It seems to be the UC’s Chancellor, Mike Drake, is in — or should be in — hot water.  If the latest reports are true, he bowed to outside political pressure, and even admitted behind closed doors (before he denied it publically) that Chemerinsky’s firing was political.

Bad days for Drake ahead.  Heck, when you even have folks at the notoriously right wing Powerline standing up for the liberal Chemerinsky, you know you’ve done something wrong:

Visiting his class on a random day, I found Professor Chemerinsky turning in a virtuouso performance.

I was thus saddened to see Professor Chemerinsky hired and fired within the space of a week as the founding dean of the new law school at the University of California-Irvine. The events seem to me to speak poorly of university chancellor Michael Drake, who does nothing to clear up the controversy in his Los Angeles Times column this morning. Like David Horowitz, I have no taste for Professor Chemerinsky’s clients or his causes. But it seems to me that in hiring and then firing Professor Chemerinsky Chancellor Drake has disgraced his institution.