The American Bar Association represents itself as an organization committed to setting the legal and ethical foundation for the American nation. They aspire to do this by promoting a quality legal education to people who want to pursue it. It isn’t a perfect system — securing funding to learn what you need to learn is the lion share of the battle, but the ABA does its part by assuring that law schools do a good enough job of teaching their students what they need to know to pass the bar and practice. This is all very duh and obvious until you try dealing with the root inequalities that product disparities in access to education and the profession. One of the ways that the ABA has tried to mitigate racial discrimination from keeping lawyers out of the profession was to require that schools make a good effort to incorporate historically disenfranchised folks in to the fold. But there’s a lot of money and influence dedicated to being angrier at corrective measures than the skewing processes that produce disparity, kind of like how Sotomayor had to apologize for her comments about Kavanaugh green lighting racial profiling before he was ever pushed to apologize for his actual opinion.
The ABA has been pussyfooting about its commitment to diversity for a year now, and could finally vote to end the diversity accreditation requirement as early as May 15th. Doing so wouldn’t do much in itself — there’s been a moratorium on the provision having any real effect for a while now — but it would signal a turn in the organization’s commitment to “the legal and ethical foundation [of] the American nation. Reuters has coverage:
Hundreds of law professors, deans, students, lawyers and bar associations are urging the American Bar Association not to eliminate its longstanding diversity and inclusion requirement for law schools, which has come under fire amid the Trump administration’s widespread campaign against DEI.
The arm of the ABA that oversees U.S. law schools received 47 written comments from individuals and groups asking it to retain or strengthen the law school diversity standard and two comments in support of repealing the rule during a 30-day public comment period that ended on Monday.
…
Eliminating the rule “will be rightly viewed as capitulating to a rightwing movement hostile to civil rights and the rule of law,” a national organization of law professors called the Critical Legal Collective wrote in one of the public comments.
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That’s the short and long of it. There have been attempts to re-frame the motivation for closing the racial umbrella on other grounds. One of the more interesting pieces of spaghetti thrown against the wall was that the diversity requirement was an antitrust violation, but if and when the ABA abandons its commitment to diversity, some think tanker at the Heritage Foundation is going to fire up the grill, cook bland food and order Chick-Fil-A so the group doesn’t have to eat their shameful cooking in celebration.
If pressures from the administration or moneyed right wing interests were all it took for the ABA to change its tune, how long until the next domino falls? Will they stop paying lip service to the importance of the rule of law just like they’ve given up on the importance of increased access to the profession? They can hem and haw about how difficult their decisions are, but they won’t have the excuse of saying that they didn’t know the consequences of their actions.
Law Professors Defend ABA’s Law School Diversity Rule Ahead Of Elimination Vote [Reuters]
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.