BREAKING NEWS

Bowing to pressure from conservatives in the UC Irvine community, university officials rescinded an offer to one of the country’s best-known constitutional law experts to be the first dean of UCI’s Donald Bren School of Law.

Erwin Chemerinsky accepted the university’s job offer on Friday, but as news spread through the UCI community opposition grew, university officials said.

On Tuesday, UCI Chancellor Michael V. Drake flew to Duke University, where Chemerinsky has taught law since 2004, to tell him the university would withdraw the job offer. Before becoming a professor at Duke, Chemerinsky taught for 21 years at the USC Law School. In April 2005, Legal Affairs magazine named Chemerinsky one of “the top 20 legal thinkers in America.”

Chemerinsky was actively involved in the 2000 presidential recount battle in Florida. At one point he represented Palm Beach County voters in a court hearing challenging the ballot and he also wrote commentaries criticizing the Supreme Court decision to halt the recount.

More recently he wrote a commentary for The Times criticizing Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, saying their testimony at their confirmation hearings “was a lot of baloney” because “they presented themselves as open-minded jurists lacking an ideological agenda,” but instead have consistently aligned themselves with the high court’s conservative bloc.