After law students sent an open letter on March 2 raising concerns about the University of New Mexico Law School administration, the University continues to face pressure with renewing Law School Dean Camille Carey’s contract.
The letter alleges multiple failures, including protecting students and ensuring accountability in disciplinary matters involving Associate Dean Steven Homer and Carey, including a case of sexual misconduct.
On Feb. 26, the ACLU wrote a letter to the Provost’s Office alleging that “problems at the law school are serious and merit attention.”
“Over the course of the last year and a half, an alarming number of students and staff have contacted ACLU-NM with a myriad of allegations of civil rights abuses occurring at the school at the hands of its leadership, including Dean Camille Carey and Associate Dean Steven Homer. At this point, the pattern has become too stark to ignore or to chalk up to a series of anomalies,” the letter reads.
UNM School of Law alum Celia Lee said she was sexually assaulted by another law student in 2023 during her first year of law school. When reporting the incident and those that followed, Lee experienced what the ACLU described in their letter as civil rights violations and “animus, sexism and retaliation” from Homer.
“I met with Homer, and told him what happened, and that's when he asked me what I did to invite that into my life,” Lee said.
The letter alleges Lee was denied due process rights from Homer after the student who assaulted her made retaliatory allegations of misconduct against her in November 2024, following a No Contact Directive that was placed against the student.
“(Homer) called me in to talk about this alleged misconduct on my behalf,“ Lee said. “I felt like he had a bias against me because I had reported sexual assault to him.”
On March 31, former law school dean Sergio Pareja sent a letter in defense of Carey to UNM President Garnett Stokes, the Provost’s Office and the Board of Regents. Pareja wrote that the student's open letter, along with two additional letters from the New Mexico Hispanic Bar Association and the ACLU, are “rife with errors.”
Pareja addressed topics listed in the open letter, including admission of local Hispanic students, the makeup of the admissions committee, faculty retention, sexual misconduct and building hours.
“From informal conversations with faculty, staff, and students, my sense is that a strong majority of people at the law school do not share the mountain of ‘concerns’ raised in the letters. Perhaps that is in part due to the fact that so many of these concerns are in fact false,” Pareja wrote.
Pareja wrote that he was “pleasantly surprised,” that Carey wanted to extend her contract. Carey became dean of the law school in 2022.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
When addressing the ACLU’s letter, Pareja wrote in his letter that “nobody’s due process rights were violated” and that the ACLU’s client “had the opportunity for a fair and impartial hearing, but she simply did not want that to happen.”
The ACLU stated in a legal filing attached to the letter, that without court intervention and Homer not being removed from Lee’s disciplinary process, she would be “deprived of a fair and equitable process.”
Lee said that when she told Homer that the accused student — who had reportedly been accused of sexual harassment by multiple people — violated the No Contact Directive, he said he would not “micromanage” the directive.
“When someone is coming to you and saying ‘my life is falling apart because of something someone else at the school did to me, please help me,’ I like to think people are kind enough to at least say ‘I might not be the right person but let me help you find the right person’ and that never happened,” Lee said.
The Daily Lobo reached out to Carey and Homer for comment, which was forwarded to UNM Executive Director of Strategic Communications Ben Cloutier, who wrote that the University is aware of the ACLU’s letter.
“In all cases involving allegations of misconduct, the University maintains policies and procedures for investigating and responding to such allegations consistent with applicable law, including federal regulations related to Title IX,” Cloutier wrote.
Lee was one of two students in the last year and a half that the ACLU formally represented for separate matters, according to the ACLU’s letter. Their other client was second-year law student Kaitlyn Urenda Harrison, who Homer “placed in disciplinary proceedings after engaging in
protected speech in violation of the First Amendment,” the letter reads.
Harrison publicly responded to a listserv email related to Charlie Kirk’s murder in Sept. 2025, and the investigation was dismissed in February.
The ACLU wrote that other students have contacted them about misconduct at the law school but could not share details due to “attorney-client privilege and a pervasive fear of retaliation by UNMSOL’s leadership.”
“They've (law school leadership) silenced everybody. Everybody's afraid to raise a complaint,” Harrison said. ”The dean and vice dean have broken the spirit of the school and it will have lasting consequences for not only the legal community, but the state, if they are not removed.”
Third-year law student Jordan Rosenberg Cobos described the School of Law as a “monopoly.”
“They're doing a disservice to the state the way they're running the school to the point where a lot of us students have talked about how there should be a second law school just for competition because they do such a bad job here that it's the monopoly,” Rosenberg Cobos said.
Leila Chapa contributed reporting on this article.
Paloma Chapa is the multimedia editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at multimedia@dailylobo.com or on X @paloma_chapa88
Editor’s note: Celia Lee was a reporter for the Daily Lobo in 2017-18. She was not involved in the reporting or writing of this article.
Paloma Chapa is the multimedia editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at multimedia@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @paloma_chapa88
