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The American Bar Association Council on Legal Education and Admissions recently suspended a Diversity, equity, and inclusion standard for the accreditation of law schools. The suspension brought this response:

Press Release

“Shame on the ABA Council”; Law Professors and Practitioners Denounce Regulator for Abetting Racist Attacks on Legal Education, Democracy, and the Rule of Law

Read Public Comment Defending Diversity & Inclusion in Legal Education

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CHICAGO — The Critical Legal Collective (CLC) joins partner organizations condemning the ABA Council on Legal Education’s shameful decision to repeal Standard 206. This modest but important standard required accredited law schools to take “concrete steps to cultivate diverse and inclusive learning environments, promote equal opportunity, reduce discrimination, and prepare lawyers to competently serve all communities.” Standard 206 was the ABA Council’s primary mechanism for promoting diversity and inclusion in U.S. law schools and buttressed a decades-long effort to remedy the ABA’s exclusionary legacy.  

“With the same short-sighted cowardice we’ve witnessed from too many leading universities and law firms,” noted CLC President Athena Mutua, “the ABA Council seems to think it can appease the Trump regime by sacrificing people of color and other sociolegally marginalized groups. This is an embarrassment and betrayal of our principles, institutions and communities. We applaud the four council members who chose not to bend the knee.”

The Council’s vote to eliminate Standard 206 disregarded the 95% of public comments that urged the law school accreditor to retain and strengthen its diversity and inclusion requirements. This overwhelming response – from a range of legal organizations, practitioners and professors – observed that federal attacks on Standard 206 buttress prolonged efforts by the Trump Administration and its reactionary allies and supporters to purge policies that promote equal opportunity in higher education generally and law schools specifically.  

The vote unfortunately reveals that the ABA Council is not up for the moment. As 275 law professors and practitioners previously cautioned, repealing Standard 206 will “enable and lend credence to the racist and misogynistic rhetoric and policies that anchor the Trump administration’s assault on our communities, our institutions and our profession. . . . [Y]our decision will communicate that the ABA Council lacks the integrity and courage necessary to serve as our nation’s leading regulator of legal education.”  

Patrice Sulton, Executive Director of the Center on Race, Inequality & the Law at NYU Law, likewise observed that the ABA Council’s decision to repeal “Standard 206 risks closing doors to some of the brightest problem solvers we have. When access to the legal profession narrows, democracy suffers.” 

Professor Margaret Montoya, who co-authored a 2009 ABA commissioned Report on the “State of Diversity in the Legal Profession,” denounced the ABA Council for failing to defend its own purported commitments: “In the face of such momentous and deleterious challenges to our place among democracies, this . . . decision to repeal Standard 206 is one piece of the authoritarian mosaic being built day by day and bit by bit.” 

A group of legal scholars studying professional identity and democacy likewise condemned the ABA Council’s “willing[ness] to sacrifice Standard 206 in the vain hope of appeasing the Trump Administration . . . Appeasement is a losing strategy against authoritarianism. Democracy and the rule of law can die incrementally when institutions charged with their defense comply by degree, as here.” CLC concurred that by voting to “eliminate Standard 206, the ABA Council will be rightly viewed as capitulating to a rightwing movement hostile to civil rights and the rule of law.”

Marc-Tizoc Gonzalez, Self-Governance Coordinator of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory (LatCrit) added, “As with “Big Brother” in Orwell’s novel, 1984, the Trump regime decrees that 2 + 2 = 5, but people of good will are not fooled. Standard 206 was a modest, yet important, effort to remedy the discrimination that the ABA itself engineered earlier in its history. With the ABA Council’s latest capitulation to the Trumpista Department of Education, the regime might allow the Council to retain its longstanding accreditation power, but only so long as it continues to distort the rule of equal justice under law. People of conscience will survive this postfascist regime, including LatCrit, and together we will pick up the pieces and rebuild toward a more perfect union of the many peoples that constitute América.”

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The Critical Legal Collective is a group of scholars and activists who have come together to protect and advance critical studies in the wake of continuing attacks on critical knowledge and multiracial democracy. It builds partnerships, projects, and power to advance critical knowledge in education and beyond, in pursuit of the promise of multiracial democracy with equal justice for all. 

The more diverse an MBA program or law school is, the higher the median starting salary offered to its graduates, two professors of marketing say in a paper published by the journal Nature. The study included a review of almost 3,400 law school classes at 200 schools over 21 years, starting in 1999. Robb Mandelbaum reported on the study for Bloomberg Law.

The study finds as follows:

“We found that MBA and JD students graduating from schools with higher racial diversity were paid higher median salaries than were graduates from less racially diverse institutions . . . . Conversely, lower racial diversity was associated with lower median salaries. Salary data measure the human-capital value of employees in labour markets: the contributions of graduates who are paid more are valued more highly than those of graduates who are paid less by their employers. Because graduates of racially diverse programmes are paid more than are those of less racially diverse programmes, policies that result in reduced racial diversity are likely to decrease learning, lower graduates’ human-capital value and reduce other benefits that can be attributed to diversity (such as cross-racial understanding, the breaking of stereotypes and the remediation of racial injustice).” (footnote omitted).