By Paul Kersey
Just go ahead and stop admitting white students to law schools across the nation. The American Bar Association (ABA) is on the cusp of enshrining open discrimination against white students, so why even admit them?
American Bar Association Poised To Mandate Diversity Training, Affirmative Action at Law Schools: Legal scholars say mandates could force law schools to violate federal law, by Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, August 25, 2021
The American Bar Association is poised to mandate diversity training and affirmative action at all of its accredited law schools, a move top legal scholars say could jeopardize academic freedom and force schools to violate federal law.
The association, which accredits nearly every law school in the United States, is mulling a plan that would require schools to âprovide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,â including a mandatory ethics course instructing students that they have an obligation to fight âracism in the law.â Schools would also be required to âtake effective actionsâ to âdiversifyâ their student bodiesâeven when doing so risks violating a law that âpurports to prohibit consideration ofâ race or ethnicity.
The proposal has sparked fierce blowback from legal scholars across the country, including 10 Sterling professors at Yale Law School, who called it a âproblematicâ and âdisturbingâ attempt to âinstitutionalize dogmaâ through the accreditation process. Violating federal law is ânot legally defensible conduct for any institution,â they wrote in a public comment on the plan in June, nor is it âa legally defensible requirement by an organization certifying law schools.â
Those arguments have so far fallen on deaf ears: When the plan was submitted for final review on Aug. 16, it contained all of the provisions to which the Yale professors had objected.
The American Bar Association is not the only accreditation body pushing progressivism. Many of the accreditors for private secondary schools require their members to integrate social justice into every aspect of their curricula, centralizing pedagogical power in the hands of bureaucrats rather than teachers. Thatâs diminished the autonomy of schools as well as families, who increasingly struggle to find institutions that are both well-credentialed and open-minded.
Few accreditors, however, are as influential as the American Bar Association. There are fewer than 250 law schools in the United States, and 199 of them are accredited by the association. In most states, attending an ABA-accredited school is a prerequisite for taking the bar exam. So when the association sets standards for law schools, it is effectively setting them for the entire legal system: corporate lawyers, criminal prosecutors, state judges, and Supreme Court justices will all be educated in whatever ideology the association dictatesâeven if it is indifferent to the rule of law itself.
The proposed standards would institutionalize that indifference throughout legal academia. Laws prohibiting schools from considering race in admissions are ânot a justification for a schoolâs non-complianceâ with the diversity requirement, one standard reads. According to the Yale professors, âIt would appear that [this language] instructs schools to risk violating state or federal law in order to retain certification.â Though the plan does tell schools to pursue diversity âby means other than those prohibited,â it never specifies what those means are, an omission the Yale professors say could encourage legally dubious activities.
Such activities might include using âpersonal ratingsâ to establish unofficial racial quotas, a practice that has landed Harvard in the Supreme Court. Though universities can use race as a âplus factorâ in admissions, they cannot set hard floors or ceilings for any particular racial group. The ABAâs accreditation plan would encourage law schools to set those ceilings anyway, through the same sort of chicanery Harvard allegedly employs.
It would also encourage students to see existing law as illegitimate. The plan mandates a course on âprofessional responsibilityâ that stresses lawyersâ âobligationâ to fight racism in the legal systemâimplying the legal system is racistâand requires students to learn about âbias, cross-cultural competency, and racismâ at least two other times before graduating. âCourses on racism and bias in the lawâ are one way of satisfying that second requirement. Insofar as this curriculum assumes the law is unjust, it supplies a justification for disobeying it.
The curricular mandates have elicited the strongest pushback from law professors, who see them as a fundamental threat to academic freedom. Brian Leiter, a legal theorist at the University of Chicago Law School, told the American Bar Association that its plan would âalmost certainly violate the academic freedom rights of faculty at many (probably most) schools.â Kate Stith, a professor and former acting dean at Yale Law School, was even more blunt, calling the proposal a âshockingâ act of overreach.
Social justice is just another word for discrimination against whites.
Hog Wash! These Idiot’s are truly over numb educated Idiot’s! This is America! Not some Banana Republic! Let them try this crap in some place that agrees with their Fascist narrative! If they try this Witchcraft, all Good Honest Lawyers need to go after then with all their guns, ammo and artillery and sue them until they wine and beg for mercy! Idiot’s! Hard to fix Stupid!