Anti-Feminist Lawyer Sues Columbia Over Women’s Studies Courses

[WSJ_law_blog]

August is now on the downslope, and back-to-school is racing toward us. In fact, many law schools begin today. So let’s close out our Monday with another look at education & the law.

The NYT’s City Room blog reports that Roy Den Hollander (pictured) — “a Manhattan lawyer and a self-described antifeminist” who in the past year has sued nightclubs for favoring women by offering ladies’ night discounts and has sued the federal government over a law that protects women from violence — is now setting his sights on Columbia University. Today, Den Hollander filed a suit against Columbia in the SDNY for offering women’s studies courses, which he sees as discriminatory toward men. His suit accuses Columbia of using government aid to preach a “religionist belief system called feminism.” A Columbia spokesman declined to comment to the NYT.

In Den Hollander’s suit he calls women’s studies “a bastion of bigotry against men” and said its women’s studies program “demonizes men and exalts women in order to justify discrimination against men based on collective guilt.” He reportedly writes in the complaint: “Federal financial aid, state funds and other assistance help proselytize feminism at Columbia,” in violation of equal protection safeguards of the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

Here, let’s pause for a moment to discuss Den Hollander, who’s background and persona perhaps warrant more coverage than this lawsuit. Last August, in a Talk of the Town item, the New Yorker magazine wrote:

Den Hollander’s latest litigative quest (there have been many: defamation suits, a nuisance complaint against neighbors) began in earnest about seven years ago. A former associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, he had moved to Russia to work as a private investigator. There he met a woman, with whom he returned to New York. They were married in March, 2000, and separated by December. (In Den Hollander v. Flash Dancers Topless Club et al., Den Hollander sued his ex-wife and her employer under the auspices of a civil RICO statute. The suit was dismissed.) “So what happened was, my best buddy in town called and said, ‘You’ve got to get back in the social life,’ ” Den Hollander recalled. “We’d say, ‘Hey, the Copa looks good tonight,’ but we wouldn’t go, because they’re charging double for guys and maybe we didn’t have the cash.”

But he sued the Copacabana (find that complaint here), as well as China Club, Lotus and Sol, all of which are still pending, as is the suit he filed against the federal government claiming parts of the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional. Den Hollander reportedly said today’s suit completes a “trilogy of antifeminist lawsuits.”

Find Den Hollander’s MySpace profile here. The homepage of his law firm’s web site says: “Now is the time for all good men to fight for their rights before they have no rights left. Contact Roy to help battle the infringement of Men’s Rights by the feminists and their allies.”

(For more on education & the law: Click here to read about the controversy over the Kamehameha schools’ preference for native Hawaiians. Click here to read about a ruling that deals with whether the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks are deemed inadequate.)