08/27/2023
For every lawyer who hates the Historic American Nation — and its foremost symbol, Donald Trump — there is a legal education that laid the ideological groundwork. Today’s radicals like Alvin Bragg (Harvard), Jack Smith (Harvard), Mark Pomerantz (Michigan), Andrew Weissmann (Columbia), Letitia James (Howard) and Fani Willis (Howard) are on some level practicing jurisprudence they learned in America’s communist-subverted Law Schools.
Law Schools have become indisputable leaders in anti-white “diversity.” They collectively made this clear after the Supreme Court handed down 6-2 and 6-3 rulings against Harvard and University of North Carolina in Students for Fair Admissions on June 29, striking down race-based Affirmative Action admissions in higher education.
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University Law School and a first-generation child of Nigerian immigrants, vowed resistance [Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig: In The Room Where it Happens, by Susan Cushing, Attorney At Law Magazine, June 3, 2020]. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Harvard College and UNC’s admission processes betrays the core values of our institution, but it does not in any way alter those values,” she told Christine Charnosky of Law.com [‘Schools Still Have Ample Power’: Legal Academia Disappointed — But Undeterred — by SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling, June 29, 2023].
Dayna Bowen Matthew, the black dean of The George Washington University Law School, was similarly effusive when interviewed by Charnosky:
We have a mission statement that says that we are a global Law School that’s committed to impacting the law through our diverse faculty, our diverse staff, our diverse students and our diverse alumni. … We know that they left the door open, saying that the opinion did not or should not be read to prohibit the consideration of race as it might have affected an applicant’s life via discrimination, inspiration or otherwise. [Emphasis added]
The Law School Admission Council also made clear its intent to employ quotas by other means, according to Charnosky.
While the Court’s ruling is deeply disappointing, we will continue our mission of expanding access to legal education through every means available. We will support our member Law Schools in their efforts to advance law and justice through holistic admission processes that consider the whole candidate. [Emphasis added]
Yet even if Law Schools weren’t hooked on quotas, they would have to impose them anyway. That’s because they have a partner-overseer in the American Bar Association, whose executive director, Alpha M. Brady, is pictured right. With about 400,000 dues-paying members, or roughly 30 percent of all licensed lawyers, ABA has long controlled law education and professional development — just as the American Medical Association (also moving far leftward) exerts dictatorial control over the training and careers of doctors.
Founded in 1878 and headquartered in Chicago, ABA has final say over the content of Law School curricula, state bar exams, and model codes of ethics. Crucially, along with state affiliates, ABA is the sole arbiter of Law School accreditation, a status conferred upon 199 of America’s 237 Law Schools. And since 1965, the U.S. Department of Education has recognized the ABA’s jurisdiction. Every Law School fears the loss or lack of accreditation — especially as graduates of unaccredited schools in many states are ineligible to take the bar exam.
Recently the ABA has pursued radical race and gender Identity Politics with an almost religious fervor. In 2007, for example, the ABA called for amending its Goal IX to promote “full and equal participation in the legal profession by minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and persons of differing sexual orientations and gender identities.” In 2010, the ABA passed Resolution 111, urging state governments to remove legal barriers to same-sex “marriages.” And in 2016, the ABA introduced a rule banning attorneys from using sexist, racist or condescending terms.
As racial and immigration issues heavily overlap, the ABA has perforce become the legal arm of the Treason Lobby. Operating on the premise that all “migrants,” aka illegal aliens, deserve an attorney, it has launched projects to make enforcement of immigration law next to impossible.
The ABA’s Commission on Immigration, among recent achievements, led a delegation of volunteers to the border city of Brownsville, Texas to provide counseling for “migrants,” asylum seekers and refugees — in other words, to teach newcomers how to break the law [On the Front Lines of Immigration at the Border: Reflections on Pro Bono Week at ProBAR, by Bonnie Fought, AmericanBar.org, September 21, 2022].
Similarly, the Association’s Immigration Justice Project, which “fills a unique and critical role in the San Diego legal community,” provides “high-quality legal services to individuals navigating immigration legal proceedings.”
Such is the ABA’s commitment to illegal aliens that it recently passed a resolution that demands their admission to the bar.
The ABA passed a resolution urging legislative bodies to ensure that admission to the bar is not denied solely on immigration status. Federal law prohibits hiring undocumented immigrants, but several states allow undocumented immigrants to practice law.https://t.co/pyRZQK8NDv
— ABA Immigration (@ABA_Immigration) August 10, 2023
In this decade, the ABA and Law Schools have revealed their revolutionary colors with a proposal to radically expand an already suffocating Affirmative Action regime [How the American Bar Association Just Radicalized Law School, by Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, February 15, 2022].
In February 2022, the ABA’s House of Delegates, after extensive public comment, voted by a lopsided 348-17 that Law Schools
must demonstrate that all law students are required to participate in a substantial activity designed to reinforce the skill of cultural competency and their obligation as future lawyers to work to eliminate racism in the legal profession.
[American Bar Association Resolution Adopted By The House Of Delegates, 2022 Midyear Meeting, February 14, 2022]
As well, schools were to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” not only “at the start of the program of legal education” but also “at least once again before graduation.”
Unexpectedly, and thankfully, these and similar-spirited mandates triggered a strong outcry. On August 8, 2022, the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions, fearful of being stuck in a constitutional quagmire in light of the SCOTUS’ grant of standing to Students for Fair Admissions, voted to shelve the plan [After Multiple Revisions, ABA House of Delegates Withdraws Diversity and Inclusion Resolution, by Christine Charnosky, Law.com, August 8, 2022].
But the full story suggests Americans should refrain from uncorking the champagne.
That saga began after the overdose death of St. George Floyd the Martyr. In July 2020, 150 Law School deans, including those from Duke, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford, urged the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to mandate that “every Law School must provide training and education of its students with regard to bias, cultural awareness, and anti-racist practices.”
“We are in a unique moment in our history to confront racism that is deeply embedded in our institutions, including in the legal profession,” they added.
The ABA obliged with revisions to Standard 206, which addresses “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Unveiled in May 2021, the revised standard could have been written by Ibram X. Kendi or Nikole Hannah-Jones. Among other things, Law Schools would have to replace the term “minority” with “people of color” in all teaching materials, take “effective actions” to create an “inclusive and equitable environment,” and add “gender identity and expression” to nondiscrimination policies.
Most onerously, it would force Law Schools to boost enrollment of “underrepresented groups” or face the loss of accreditation.
Aware that the new standards conflicted with state laws barring race and sex discrimination at public universities, the ABA simply told the universities to ignore the law:
The requirement of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of race, color, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, or military status in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a school’s noncompliance with Standard 206. A Law School that is subject to such constitutional or statutory provisions would have to demonstrate the effective actions and progress required by Standard 206 by means other than those prohibited by the applicable constitutional or statutory provisions.
[The ABA is Stretching the Limits of Law with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Rule, The Federalist Society, May 16, 2022. Emphases added]
After adoption by the ABA’s House of Delegates, celebration ensued. Hulett Askew — chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Conference of Bar Examiners and a former top official with the radical and taxpayer-funded Legal Services Corporation — exulted before the ABA’s House of Delegates: “I hope you recognize how remarkable it is that 75 percent of the deans of the Law Schools in America asked for this standard” [U.S. law students to receive anti-bias training after ABA passes new rule, by Karen Sloan, Reuters, February 14, 2022].
Fortunately, dissenters were not sitting on the sidelines. Cautioned Sarah Perry and Zack Smith of the Heritage Foundation:
Far from equalizing admission and scholarship opportunities for students and staff, these proposals would — as some prominent legal scholars have noted — instead make Law Schools more race-conscious, more politically correct, and less intellectually diverse.
[The American Bar Association’s ‘Diversity’ Agenda Endangers the Integrity of the Legal Profession, March 31, 2022]
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis bravely and sternly rebuked ABA for its Leftism:
Notably absent is any requirement that faculty be intellectually diverse. The ABA is content to have professors singing the same political hymnal so long as they create the favored mix of races, genders and sexual preferences. A recent article in the Journal of Legal Studies…shows that a hiring focus on many of the ABA’s preferred characteristics makes law faculties even more Left-wing than they already are.
[Why the Lawyers Cartel Is Pushing for Woke Law Schools, July 15, 2021]
Peter Wood, president of the New York–based National Association of Scholars, explained that diversity means remedial on-the-job education:
This relatively recent ideological overlay has displaced the “practice readiness” that law firms once expected Law Schools to inculcate among their graduates. Law firms these days routinely complain that they, not Law Schools, must educate new JDs on how to practice law. Students may spend three years and tens of thousands of dollars in Law School for little more than a superficial understanding of the law coupled with indoctrination in social justice theory.
[NAS Opposes the ABA’s Woke Standards for Law Schools, NAS.org, July 20, 2021]
Apparently patriots and constitutionalists won this round. But the American Bar Association has made new noises lately about eliminating the Law School Admissions Test because blacks score lower than whites [ABA pauses move to nix LSAT requirement, by Karen Sloan, Reuters, May 12, 2023].
In addition, again, Law School deans would give extra weight in admissions to “lived experiences.”
In practice, of course, “lived experiences,” like “holistic admissions,” is Leftist code for “keep whites out of Law School.”
In other words, anti-white egalitarianism still lurks at America’s Law Schools.
The Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California is representative. The “Law, Race and Equity” section on its website, which features an image (above) of what appears to be communist street rally, says:
USC Gould School of Law is committed to advancing justice, affirming the dignity and equality of all persons, and rejecting racism and bigotry in all its forms. Faculty, staff and students are taking steps to acknowledge and combat the inherent racism of our legal system, and to ensure the Law School, the legal profession and our justice system are more representative of, and accessible to, individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous and people of color [BIPOC].
If Law Schools and the American Bar Association get their way, the ultimate losers will be American patriots. That will be especially true if large numbers of college students drop Law School after learning what’s in store for them.
Law Schools are now training centers for the Treason Lobby, obsessed with equalizing outcomes across social groups without regard for rule of law or professional aptitude.
The American Bar Association stands ready to make sure these schools toe the line.
And you wonder why lawyer jokes remain popular.
Carl Horowitz is a veteran Washington, D.C.-area writer on immigration and other issues.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.