Samuel Vincent Jones (Illinois-Chicago), Law Schools, Cultural Competency, and Discrimination, 21 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol'y 84 (2021):

American Bar Association (“ABA”)-approved law schools are constructed and marketed as the primary means by which law students acquire the core competencies to practice law. The conventional wisdom within the legal profession is that the ABA-approved law school experience is a programmatic academic response to societal needs that provides all law students with culturally responsive and innovative learning opportunities in a safe environment. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom by advancing what some observers may consider a bold claim–that anti-Black racial discrimination represents a continuous and constitutive feature of the law school experience. It posits that Black law students are expected to learn under a system of legal education governance that ignores their long struggle to escape the calamitous effects of anti-Black racism that denies them equal opportunities to practice law. 

Part II critiques the Black law student experience, calling particular attention to traditional suppositions and conceptions of liberty relative to the ABA’s apparent unwillingness to curtail anti-Black racial harassment on law school campuses, underrepresentation among Black law students and faculty, and comparatively dismal graduation and bar passage rates among Black law students. It questions the viability of continued reliance on the ABA accreditation paradigm as an appropriate response to anti-Black racial discrimination on law school campuses and examines an existing dichotomy by which well-articulated ABA rules that appear to prohibit anti-Black racial discrimination and advance diversity coexist alongside law school practices that discriminate against members of this highly vulnerable class of law students. In so doing, it confronts contemporary assumptions about ABA expectations regarding law school compliance with antidiscrimination policies as they relate to Black law students.

Part III takes a philosophical incursion into our conceptual mapping of the Black law student experience as it relates to the value of “cultural competency” legal instruction as an effective, and potentially required, response to anti-Black racial discrimination. In so doing, it explores how self-interested notions of freedom of expression, autonomy, and economic interest facilitate racially oppressive outcomes for Black law students.

This Article does not attempt to expound on all categories of anti-Black racial discrimination in law schools or prove a normative thesis regarding law schools. Rather, it shows the inaccuracy of the conventional wisdom and how we are now past the point where it is reasonable to doubt whether current models of law school governance incorporate moral culpability and institutional accountability sufficiently enough to protect Black law students from anti-Black racial discrimination.