Top Law School Will Make Race-Related Coursework Mandatory For Graduation

The school is the second in the country -- and the first in the UC system -- to require such a class.

In response to calls for racial justice, law schools across the country continue to search for ways to offer their students education on racism and systemic inequities in America. Earlier this year, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law announced that it would require students in the class of 2024 and beyond to take a course on racism and the law as a graduation requirement. Now, another California law school will require that a similar course be taken as a graduation requirement, but in this case, the decision is historic.

The UC Irvine School of Law recently announced that it will require all students to take a graded course related to “race and indigeneity, structural inequity, and the historical bases for such inequity” in order to graduate. Irvine will be the first law school in the University of California system to mandate such a course.

Here’s an excerpt from the school’s press release about its new coursework:

The UCI Law faculty already teach a substantial number of courses devoted to race, indigeneity, and the law that will enable students to meet the requirement. The faculty will also develop new courses, including classes taught by faculty joining for the 2021-22 academic year (announcement forthcoming).

Led by UCI Law’s Curriculum Committee and its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee, the new graduation requirement supports a larger effort by faculty to integrate considerations of race and indigeneity, particularly in the first-year required courses, but also in required core clinics and other upper-level courses. Students will have pervasive exposure to critical concepts rooted in a range of equity categories, including race and indigeneity, dis/ability, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic background, survivors of family and domestic violence, system-involvement, and veteran status.

UC Irvine faculty will debut a new first-year elective in Spring 2022 that will allow students to meet the race and indigeneity requirement in their first year of law school. “Dismantling centuries of Anti-Blackness and racism will not occur overnight, but we must commit to action and not simply platitudes,” Dean L. Song Richardson said. “For us at UCI Law, change not only begins with asking how we can do better to fight against Anti-Blackness and racism, in all of its manifestations, but also asking how we can use our voices, our power, our scholarship, our teaching, and our influence to make changes in the profession and society.”

Like USC Law before it, Irvine Law is taking an incredibly important step here by making its race coursework mandatory. It ensures that all students at the school will learn the important lessons being taught, not just students who would normally choose to take the class as an elective. Hopefully more law schools will soon begin to make courses that teach these essential lessons a requirement.


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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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