For some law students, brass-knuckled litigation begins before they even finished school.

At the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, an award-winning law professor has sued two of his students, claiming that they defamed him by wrongly describes him on campus as racist. The tenured professor, Richard J. Peltz, an authority on the freedom of speech, denies he is racist.

Professor Peltz, who knows, has several teaching awards for his work at the University of Bowen’s School of Law, where he taught since 1998.

In a constitutional law class in 2005, he displayed what some of his black law students described to university officials as belittling satirical article from the onions in Rosa Parks. He also, according to the students, criticized affirmative action and promised to award black students who rated as high as white students in an exam one additional point.

Amid the simmering tensions, Professor Peltz last month filed a civil lawsuit against two of the law students, Valerie D. nation and Chrishuana L. Clark, both third year students. The complaint also names as defendants Eric S. Buchanan, a lawyer for the W. Harold Flowers Law Society in Little Rock, an association of black lawyers in Arkansas, and the company itself, and the local chapter of the Black Law Students Association.