The Standards Review Committee of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has proposed revising accreditation standard chapter 3 (Program of Legal Education) to incorporate ”Student Learning Outcomes.” The committee will discuss the proposed standards as part of the AALS Annual Meeting Program on Friday January 8, 2010, from 4:00 p.m. – 5:45 p.m. in the Napoleon Ballroom on the third floor of the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.
Looking at the proposal, we find that “the learning outcomes shall include”:
(3) knowledge and understanding of:
(ii) the legal profession’s values of justice, fairness, candor, honesty, integrity, professionalism, respect for diversity and respect for the rule of law;
No further explanation is provided as to what “knowledge and understanding of … respect for diversity” entails. My suspicion is that this is just p.c. pablum inserted to satisfy constituencies that demand it. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with “respect for diversity,” if this means “respecting and treating fairly all clients and colleagues regardless of their background.” Indeed, this is praiseworthy.
However, given the past record of ABA accreditation committees, who have rather loosely interpreted ABA guidelines to try to enforce a political agenda on law schools–for example, requiring strong affirmative action preferences in admissions when there was no textual basis in the accreditation guidelines for such a requirement–one could easily imagine this language being misused in the future. Teaching “respect for diversity” could easily be interpreted as teaching that law schools, law firms, etc., should and must engage in affirmative action preferences.
Without further clarification, the ABA could easily threaten the accreditation of a law school if a substantial percentage of the faculty signed a brief opposing Grutter-like diversity admissions; or if students interviewed by the accreditation people complained that the faculty seems to them insufficiently supportive of “diversity” (i.e., affirmative action) in its teaching; or if professors assigned academic papers arguing that homogenous organizations or societies function better than heterogeneous ones; or if the law school failed to discipline students who undertook a satirical “affirmative action bake sale”; and so forth. After all, any of these hypotheticals could arguably decrease students’ “respect for diversity,” depending on how this phrase is interpreted.
I won’t be attending the committee meeting, but I hope someone who does attend raises these concerns, and asks the committee to clarify the guidelines such that they make clear that teaching “respect for diversity” does not obligate a law school or any of its constituents to take any given position on the desirability of affirmative action preferences, or any other political position (such as the pluses or minuses of homogenous and heterogeneous organizations).
ruuffles says:
“knowledge and understanding of” does not equal “[daily] practice of”
December 31, 2009, 9:27 amDavid Bernstein says:
True, but how, e.g., can a professor teach the “legal profession’s value[] of… respect for diversity,” if diversity is taken to mean affirmative action preferences, if that professor doesn’t believe that this is indeed a “value” of the profession, but rather morally repugnant or practically counter-productive?
December 31, 2009, 9:31 amCornellian says:
Perhaps a further amendment, adding the words “of viewpoint” after “diversity” would be in order.
December 31, 2009, 9:32 amDWC says:
How do you demonstrate “knowledge and understanding” of “respect for diversity” without having a separate lecture or series on diversity? ABA review of Law Schools would undoubtedly ask for evidience of such instruction, and that the students learned from it (e.g. testing). Is this essential to the production of legal professionals? You can bet that ABA officers will suddenly become expert on this training and fly around being paid to give these oh so important lectures.
December 31, 2009, 9:34 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Once more I point out that if we’re serious about diversity as an essential part of education, there’s a clear government interest in reinstituting anti-miscegenation laws. Diversity is much reduced if everyone is Tiger Woods.
December 31, 2009, 9:47 amEric Rasmusen says:
Does the actual text matter, or can a good lawyer always find an excuse, in our present day, for doing whatever he wants anyway? I’ve heard that strong affirmative action discrimination is a de facto requirement for law schools at present. Is that based on any text, or did the ABA just make it up?
December 31, 2009, 9:53 amBenjamin Davis says:
Well last day of 2009 and we go back to this – some kind of parting shot.
“Respect for diversity” is about as weak as it gets by itself don’t you think? Hey I respect diversity – what does it mean. It is a very meager vessel rather than something to get one’s knickers in an uproar about. David as much admits that and then takes us to the “affirmative action shibboleth” to try to get the juices flowing about it.
Given the history of the ABA not permitting black lawyers to become members (oh sorry, I guess going back a few decades in history is too much on this stuff though curiously no one has a problem going back centuries in the name of originalism), this just seems to me to be a meager tweak to the consciousness that educating all kinds of peoples as lawyers is to be respected.
Happy New Year everyone!
Best,
December 31, 2009, 10:14 amBen
Sammy Finkelman says:
It’s worse. “respect for diversity” means no one should even oppose the idea. “respect for dioversity” is also a code word for a diversity program i.e. different criteria for admissions based upon race (as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, where people from Africa, people from the Caribbean, and people whose ancestors were all in the United States in 1865 are all the same)
December 31, 2009, 10:20 amSammy Finkelman says:
It’s a code word.
At a later point, if they have the votes, and even if they don’t, the writers and similarly inclined people, will attempt to make it mean something.This ohrase will be defined later.Double talk is necessry esecially because some of what they want might be illegal.
December 31, 2009, 10:23 amDavid Bernstein says:
I agree with Benjamin on what the likely intent of the proposed rule is, a feel-good measure reminding law school of their need to be “inclusive.” And like I said, I hardly object to reminding students of their obligations to treat everyone with respect.
But I also know that ABA accreditation committees have tended to make things up as they go along, with no respect for transparency, due process, or any other norms that one would expect such powerful lawyers to respect, even beyond the fact that the law says that they have to. (The law being Department of Education rules for accrediting organizations).
So I assume that we can agree that adding some language to the effect that this proposal is NOT intended to interfere in any way with academic freedom is unobjectionable.
December 31, 2009, 10:26 amArthurKirkland says:
I suppose the “diversity” language could be a PC bone thrown to those who can’t move past dredging up exclusion of blacks, or exclusion of female lawyers from courtrooms for wearing pants (unless they had a note from a husband, of course — true story) . . or it could be distasteful code for some other liberal claptrap . . . but optimism requires hope that it involves a different type of diversity, such as that which promotes inclusion of a Jewish literature specialist in every English department.
December 31, 2009, 10:37 amOff Kilter says:
This, no doubt, was exactly what my wife had in mind when she said, “You better not be like Tiger Woods!”
December 31, 2009, 10:47 amsureyoubet says:
How will a professor discuss the constitutionality of Affirmative Action preferences in class without risking a showing that he and/or the school “lacks respect for diversity?” Will those cases and any discussion of them be banned? (Horrors, students might conclude that the country and the Constituion “lack respect for diversity” since the Constitution may outlaw what the ABA leadership believes is the most important tool available to force people to respect diversity.)
I’d be just as concerned with the reference to “fairness.” My guess is that the ABA leadership’s view of “fair” might be very different than yours or mine. When I was in law school, the ABA view of “fair” would have meant firing all professors with a law and economics bent along with any that thought the First Amendment protected speech that might offend particular groups.
Finally, Tiger Woods clearly does not respect diversity. Look at a lineup of all his alleged affairs, and there isn’t a lot of variance in appearance.
December 31, 2009, 11:03 amSandy MacHoots says:
The ABA and AALS already lean very hard on law schools to demonstrate racial diversity in faculty and students and the way that they promote it. They already tend to regard expressions of opposition to affirmative action as demonstrating “hostility” to marginalized groups. The new language doesn’t seem to go beyond what they’re already doing.
No, neither the ABA nor the AALS call for viewpoint diversity.
December 31, 2009, 11:11 amRodger Lodger says:
Can you teach young adults respect? How does that work — threaten them with low grades or other penalties? Or does the education proceed by revelation of the goodness of diversity, thereby molding the students’ minds? Sounds like science fiction to me.
December 31, 2009, 11:12 amShelbyC says:
Maybe she also meant “Rich”?
December 31, 2009, 11:19 amVegasGuy says:
“affirmative action”
I have to admit being surprised this crafty term is still in use by rational people. And “diversity” in the context of “special attention paid to blacks” is right behind. Al and Jessie would be proud. MLK, not so much.
December 31, 2009, 11:28 amMartinned says:
Reading about Peter Baldwin’s America vs. Europe book recently, one is once again reminded that the difference between the US and the EU is “not a grand opposition of worldviews or ideologies…it is the still unresolved legacy of slavery and its tragic modern consequence of a ghettoized and racially identifiable underclass”.”
Quoting from the Financial Times review:
In that context, “special attention paid to blacks” doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
December 31, 2009, 11:39 amBenjamin Davis says:
Well this is fun. The ABA and AALS are institutions with institutional memory and the respect for diversity language is a very weak tea – consistent with the very weak tea of the legalist approaches in the US to how to get to integration. I will get over American history, when others in the world get over their history (Irish and the English; French with the Germans and the English; etc). The first thing for me has been to just have the history recognized let alone gotten over. Get over it has a connotation of forgetting it or not taking it into account. My worry is that we repeat it (neo-segregation etc). Long history of the evolution of this “living in America as an American” stuff since 1619 for blacks.
Pantsuits in court trivializes the experiences of women like Sandra Day O’Connor not being able to even get a job when she came out of law school.
No need to trivialize people’s painful memories – like NINA for the Irish – these things have pasts that come into the present.
Each of these may not be yours, but as I attempt not to trivialize your pain, do not trivialize mine.
Best,
December 31, 2009, 11:39 amBen
Rich says:
This will only be the start. I teach in a college and we are ABET certified as a department. This is different and in additional to our regional accreditation which is done by a differenty organization. The whole thing about student learning outcomes comes out of the schools of education and have a tendency to be very touchy feely in writing but when you try to define it it gets quite hairy. There is an outside committee that will look at it and help you decide what those outcomes should be and what kinds of measurements will need to be done. In going through two reviews so far – I have seen a ton of work in gathering the data to support your efforts concerning the outcomes. Two problems that I have seen, 1. in general the “outcomes” usually have to do with things that are PC and promote certain agendas and 2. have very little to do with the students actually acquiring skills that will be of use in the workplace.
In our case the employers do not know about the certification and when they find out about it they don’t care.
December 31, 2009, 11:55 amNext, it is in addition to the schools accreditation and so is a good amount of effort and money on top of that effort.
Finally, our school of business has aacsb accreditation and two things came out of their last review; 1. to be an academically qualified professor you needed to demonstrate that you had current publications in acceptable journals and conferences. It was mentioned that they, aacsb, was looking to restrict the acceptable journals and conferences as it was too easy to be considered qualified at that point and 2. that too many schools had the accreditation and they were planning on tightening up the process to reduce the number of schools.
Okay so of what use is aacsb? To students, it may help in getting into Graduate school but realize that many business schools will only hiring new faculty that graduated from an aacsb school. It sort of is perpetuating itself. Again employers, except for the Government, in general do not care.
aacsb and abet are basically academic ego boosts that appear to do little to enhance the education of the students and they all start with student outcomes!
Richard S says:
Given the bar exam, why is accreditation necessary? If one can pass the bar, shouldn’t that, at least in principle, be all one need do to practice law? (I realize that the federal government needs (or thinks it needs) something to determine who may receive federal funds, but there’s always the Hillsdale route, no?)
December 31, 2009, 12:00 pmRichard S says:
To clarify, I am speaking in principle, not in law. Laws can be changed, albeit often with great difficulty.
December 31, 2009, 12:01 pmMartyA says:
Isn’t “diversity” most important at the end of a program? Should a program fail to graduate blacks in the same ratio as whites or fewer, in absolute numbers, wouldn’t either show a lack of “respect for diversity?”
December 31, 2009, 12:01 pmHypothetical situation: assume that a Harvard law professor found that a promising, clean and articulate black law student had plagiarized a key paper he had turned in; if the professor blew the whistle on the black student, wouldn’t he be demonstrating a lack of “respect for diversity” for doing so?
Doc Merlin says:
Will this result in an alternative bar association that isn’t the ABA?
December 31, 2009, 12:02 pmMike Perry says:
Years ago, a friend who’d just taken her CPA exam complained that the test was unnecessarily hard simply to get the number of CPAs down and their income high. She easily passed, but was bothered by the unfairness.
Something similar is going on with the ABA. For this bar association, it’s much more appealing to admit poorly qualified blacks and Hispanics to law school than talented Asians or hardworking whites who may the first in their family to go to college. It’s incompetence they really want and not diversity.
Think for a moment. As a lawyer eager to get rich, which would you rather have as a competitor: a black with an LSAT score of 122 (well below average) or a Chinese immigrant’s son with a sky-high LSAT of 179? That’s what this game is about.
As the data shows, that artificially privileged group is much more likely to drop out of law school or to never pass their bar exams. As they say in programming, for the ABA that’s a feature not a bug. The result may be bad for the country (and for minorities) but, by keeping down the number of lawyers, the result is good for lawyers. And even if these people do become lawyers, they’re not likely to be competing for the top-paying jobs. They’ll be stuck in some front-office, just-for-appearances position without real power.
The result of this fake ‘respect for diversity’ is obviously more money for ABA-affiliated lawyers. And with their well-established connections to academia, they need not fear that their children will be kept out by diversity quotas, quotas that for the most part do precisely what they are intended to do, keep out the intelligent, hard-working children of white plumbers and Asian immigrants.
That this is the real scheme is demonstrated by an undeniable fact. What point of views are by far the most over-represented in a typical law school? The obvious answer are views held by the law school faculty and (by extension) their sons and daughters. Any genuine diversity program would begin by excluding the children of law school faculty from law school admissions. Until law schools and the ABA begin to implement that policy, we need not take their claims seriously.
December 31, 2009, 12:04 pmSteve says:
How will a professor discuss the constitutionality of Affirmative Action preferences in class without risking a showing that he and/or the school “lacks respect for diversity?” Will those cases and any discussion of them be banned?
if the professor blew the whistle on the black student, wouldn’t he be demonstrating a lack of “respect for diversity” for doing so?
Some of these comments deserve to be framed for posterity.
December 31, 2009, 12:18 pmUncle Walt says:
Maybe it’s different now. When I went to law school the notion was that our background on admission would likely be different but we would all end by speaking the same language and acting like lawyers. I now have more in common with a Pentacostal African-American lesbian lawyer thirty years my junior, than I have with many of my relatives who are not lawyers.
Diversity, as frequently implemented in higher education today, operates kinda like membership in a club. Showing respect for the club qualifies one for admission. That, and knowing the diversity secret handshake. And who to exclude. And dues. But mostly who to exclude.
Accreditation is basically about exclusion and inclusion.
December 31, 2009, 12:21 pmKazinski says:
Unless of course it is counter productive. In the case of law school admissions there is empirical evidence that it is counter productive. The study is flawed however, because it doesn’t address whether the harm it does to struggling young Black law students is more than compensated by making well off White law school administrators feel better about themselves. I suspect that is the real point of most affirmative action programs.
December 31, 2009, 12:25 pmMark Field says:
I nominate Mike Perry’s.
December 31, 2009, 12:31 pmHouston Lawyer says:
So the ABA is all behind the idea that Blacks should be admitted to law schools to which they would otherwise be denied admission based on their academic credentials. It also insists that anyone who objects to this form of racism does so only because he is a racist. This must now be taught to all law students at accredited schools.
Diversity is nothing other than a code word for the preferred type of racism.
December 31, 2009, 12:35 pmKazinski says:
I think the solution is to strip the ABA of accreditation authority. Private entities that are allowed to practice viewpoint discrimination should not be allowed to set standards for public institutions where the first amendment precludes viewpoint discrimination. The problem isn’t limited to just the ABA and law schools, there are also problems with the National Association of Social Workers, and in schools of education. Here is a scary example from Washington State University School of Education. Where the school was trying to expel a conservative student because he wasn’t thinking right (or left actually):
December 31, 2009, 12:54 pmDocinPA says:
Why don’t you guys in the legal profession do to the ABA what most of us doctors have done to the AMA and tell them to go to hell and quit? It sounds like it’s just another leftist propaganda organ.
December 31, 2009, 1:02 pmThe River Temoc, In Winter says:
Hypothetical situation: assume that a Harvard law professor found that a promising, clean and articulate black law student had plagiarized a key paper he had turned in; if the professor blew the whistle on the black student, wouldn’t he be demonstrating a lack of “respect for diversity” for doing so?
No, because he’s turning in the student for plagiarism, not because he’s black. Thanks for playing, though.
December 31, 2009, 1:04 pmFloridan says:
DB: “But I also know that ABA accreditation committees have tended to make things up as they go along, with no respect for transparency, due process, or any other norms that one would expect such powerful lawyers to respect, even beyond the fact that the law says that they have to”
It seems your problem should be with how the accreditation committees function rather than the term “respect for diversity.”
December 31, 2009, 1:05 pmThe River Temoc, In Winter says:
As a lawyer eager to get rich, which would you rather have as a competitor: a black with an LSAT score of 122 (well below average) or a Chinese immigrant’s son with a sky-high LSAT of 179? That’s what this game is about.
As a lawyer eager to get rich, you should go back and get an MBA, not practice law at all.
December 31, 2009, 1:05 pmMalvolio says:
It wouldn’t seem like a bad idea if it helped. If affirmative action, and welfare, and job training, and everything else in what Milton Friedman called “the rag-bag of liberal nostrums” actually made blacks (or anybody) better off, I would say, eh, maybe it isn’t perfectly libertarian, but what the hey.
But affirmative action is terrible for its supposed beneficiaries. Letting someone in to a school where he is markedly less qualified virtually guarantees he won’t finish and even if he does, his credentials will be badly tarnished by the very fact of affirmative action.
December 31, 2009, 1:07 pmSuperSkeptic says:
Bernstein’s post on the ABA and Diversity is an example of the type of thinking Kerr knocked with regards to Obama and Interpol.
As a side-note for you fellow ABA haters, just be grateful we have the ABA for “self-regulation” instead of being nationalized by the government. It’d be easier to argue than medicine and banks (in theory sans ABA & lobbying $$$) To wit: Legal advice is a public good. Everyone is constitutionally entitled to it. Single-payer legal system. Look how good it already works for our prosecutors and PDs! Contingency fees are immoral, why should lawyers profit off of the degree of injury of another?
December 31, 2009, 1:29 pmShelbyC says:
And have to compete with any schmuck that can make a better or cheaper product than me? Screw that.
December 31, 2009, 1:45 pmConstantin says:
Words fail.
December 31, 2009, 2:39 pmCrunchy Frog says:
The above is why there is no hope for racial conciliation in this country until most of the current generation is dead and buried.
December 31, 2009, 2:46 pmsbron says:
The legal system is widely considered unfair to Black and Latino defendants. But who would be more likely to get a Black or Latino (or anyone) acquitted, someone who “looked like them” and was a middling Law student with the 122 LSAT, or the “Chinese immigrant’s son with a sky-high LSAT of 179?”
December 31, 2009, 3:06 pmRyan Waxx says:
It takes a certain selective sort of myopia to be intimately familiar with events “going back a few decades in history” and “going back centuries”, yet be totally oblivious to the present. Specifically, to pretend to not know that the ABA has been caught several times tying to enforce its view of “diversity”. To be frank, this institution hasn’t earned the right for its diversity requirements to be interpreted innocently, because it does not have a record of interpreting such diversity requirements in a reasonable manner.
If we were talking about the girl scouts, then Benjamin’s admonition might make a tiny bit of sense. But the ABA is not made up of girl scouts.
December 31, 2009, 3:16 pmRightnyer says:
Only liberals “widely” think that the system is unfair to Black and Latino defendants. I certainly don’t. If anything, I think they are given an advantage.
December 31, 2009, 3:56 pmRPT says:
Id that “advantage” reflected in arrest, convictions and incarceration statistics?
December 31, 2009, 4:06 pmRightnyer says:
No, it’s reflected in the fact that liberal judges are more likely to feel badly for black and latino defendants. Their higher arrest and conviction rates are solely due to the fact that they have genetically lower average IQs, and thus, commit more crime.
December 31, 2009, 4:09 pmSteve says:
The only thing missing from this thread is a bake sale.
December 31, 2009, 4:11 pmEvilDave says:
It is a shame we don’t have a professional organization to represent us, only this political organization, the ABA.
It is a shame that The Left believes in a totalitarian ideology that can’t leave any segment of society free of their control.
December 31, 2009, 4:49 pmMark Field says:
Someone even beat Zarkov to tell us that blacks are genetically inferior.
Nothing like an AA thread to bring out the best on the Right.
December 31, 2009, 5:35 pmChrisTS says:
Steve:
Some of these comments deserve to be
December 31, 2009, 6:00 pmframedflamed for posterity.ChrisTS says:
We have the nuts already. I’ll go get some milk and eggs.
December 31, 2009, 6:06 pmOctavian says:
If the ABA keeps up these shenanigans, then the answer to your question is “yes, in due time.”
December 31, 2009, 7:37 pmOctavian says:
I’m frankly surprised that the ABA has not yet proposed adding “an appreciation of one’s duty to save the planet” to the list of desired “learning outcomes.
December 31, 2009, 7:41 pmtheobromophile says:
So if Wellesley wanted to start a law school, it would not be accredited….? If a school realised that homogeneous environments are better and that black students would have a better chance of success in an exclusively black environment, that law school would not be accredited?
December 31, 2009, 8:15 pmGM says:
I too am a bit concerned by ambiguous language enforced by non-transparent accreditation committees. Diversity can mean a lot of things to different people. Are we looking for respect for racial diversity? That goal will probably be less controversial than we are making it out to be here in the comment thread. Now what about gender diversity, that too will likely be uncontroversial.
How about religious diversity and sexual orientation diversity? How does a school like Baylor teach students to respect the diversity of same sex lifestyle decisions when their faculty is bound by a code of conduct which would prohibit teaching such values? What about law schools who require as part of appointments, promotion and tenure that their faculty members participate in an organized faith community? Can those faculty members truly value the diversity which comes with atheism? Can we mandate that those law professors at religiously affiliated law schools teach atheism to fulfill the diversity requirement of the ABA? What about law schools who allow those discriminating military recruiters on campus? Will religiously affiliated law schools be targeted by accredidation committees on these grounds? The challenges religiously affiliated law schools could face from these standards are not paranoid delusions on my part, see for example this issue (http://www.swlaw.edu/jleweb/jle59_1) of the Journal of Legal Education for a more detailed discussion of how the Baylor faculty views their role as religiously affiliated instructors and the oath they must sign.
This may be harmless language to assuage ourselves of our guilt, or this diversity langauge may become the club by which accredidation committees can go after religiously affiliated law schools. Either way, some clarification is warranted.
December 31, 2009, 8:43 pmneurodoc says:
The ABA accredits law schools and vetts judges; the AMA has no comparable powers, and it wouldn’t be otherwise if more physicians did belong to the AMA at present.
December 31, 2009, 10:38 pmneurodoc says:
I’m not sure why you pick Wellesley for your hypothetical. Because it is an all-women college and you imagine that if they were to start a law school (could be wrong, but don’t think they confer any graduate degrees), admissions would be limited to women or at least that women would vastly outnumber men? I imagine that any school that wanted to discriminate in admissions on the basis of gender or race would have a tough time passing legal muster, and if it somehow wasn’t violative of civil rights laws, then I think its chances of gaining accreditation would be between slim and none.
December 31, 2009, 10:50 pmCato The Elder says:
In urban areas, many meta-analyses show that Blacks are incarcerated disproportionately less than their corresponding offense rate. So, yes, that advantage is reflected in the statistics. We’ve had this argument before, if you’ll recall, and I remember the newest liberal line then was that the sort of crimes that Blacks were committing were inordinately punished with longer sentences for essentially the same transgression. The evidence produced by the commenter for that assertion came from a USA Today article, IIRC.
January 1, 2010, 12:59 amThe AK says:
Of course you mean presbyopia.
January 1, 2010, 8:52 amKay Sieverding says:
A new national bar association could be more easily funded if set up as a franchise. The locals could bring in computers and office space using their personal resources and pay a % to the national. The national could use new technology to operate with staff who wouldn’t all have to live in one place. The initial funding costs can be funded incrementally.
January 1, 2010, 9:54 amneurodoc says:
I was going to challenge you on presbyopia versus myopia, but then went back to the exchange between Ryan Waxx and Benjamin Davis and saw that the claim was ability to see that which was distant (temporally) but not that which was up close. You aren’t an ophthalmologist, optometrist, or optician, are you?
January 1, 2010, 10:49 amInterested says:
It seems odd to me that we are requiring discrimination in the name of preventing it. Racial and/or ethnic preferences, of any kind or for any reason, should be prohibited. Furthermore, even assuming a reasonable argument for their continuance could be made, they do minorities more harm than good by giving others the impression that minorities need special treatment. We would all be better off if we could accept the notion of equality of OPPORTUNITY. Stated another way, give every person the opportunity to cling to the vine themselves. If he/she cannot do so through force of will, let him/her fall and rot.
As to the proposed language, I have no doubt the ABA will find some way of furthering their notions of affirmative action by using this language. Will it be any worse than their current position? Who knows. The point, though, is that we should be pushing them to move the language in the other direction. Rubber meets road—diversity has nothing to do with whether a school should be accredited. That is, does a lack of diversity, either in the student body or the faculty, necessarily impact the school’s ability to teach law? Most of us were taught law by white men. Do we have inferior educations? I thought accrediting bodies were only concerned with maintaining a minimum standard for education–not public policy. Hm.
January 1, 2010, 10:17 pmInterested says:
“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us…. I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! … And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.” Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 349-50 (2003) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (quoting What the Black Man Wants: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 26 January 1865, reprinted in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 59, 68 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds.1991) (emphasis in original)).
January 1, 2010, 10:38 pmChrisTS says:
Interested:
Accrediting bodies aside, are you serious? Do you think the ‘no Jews/blacks/women/Catholics/Irish/Italians/etc’ policies of our premier colleges and universities over the many generations were based in concern for academic merit?
A) Which ‘us’ is that?
January 2, 2010, 1:06 amB) Hmm.
theobromophile says:
neurodoc: yes, I chose Wellesley because it is an all-women’s school that could want to maintain that identity if it were to start a law school.
The point that I was trying to make, and made badly, apparently, is that the same people who often support institutions like Wellesley and all-girl’s education in traditionally male-dominated fields are also the people who tend to support the ABA’s notions of advancing diversity.
January 2, 2010, 4:04 amInterested says:
ChrisTS,
No. I don’t think the past practices were based on educational merit, and my comments in no way even remotely imply that. They were clearly based on discrimination. The point, however, seems irrelevant, as I thought we were talking about the ABA and its CURRENT or POTENTIAL policies.
The “us” I was referring to: the majority of the 30,000 or so readers of this blog.
I am not sure what, if any, point you were making in part “B.” Thus, I can’t respond.
January 2, 2010, 10:55 amBrandie Rosensteel says:
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May 30, 2010, 1:00 pmKay Sieverding says:
Carolyn Lamm, current ABA president, was the lead defense counsel against me, a pro se litigant. With ABA endorsement I was imprisoned by former judge Naughty Nottingham for 5 months without a criminal charge, arraignment, bail hearing, etc. Lamm wrote: “Finally, the ABA brings to the Court’s attention that on Friday, September 2, 2005 the Colorado District Court held Plaintiff Kay Sieverding in civil contempt for violating that court’s injunction against further pro se filings by Plaintiffs related to this matter and refusing to withdraw this and other actions filed after the Colorado District Court judgment was issued. Ms. Sieverding was remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshal and remains incarcerated pending her voluntary dismissal of the remaining actions.”
05-cv-01672-RMU Document 8-2 Filed 09/19/2005 p. 2
May 31, 2010, 10:07 am