The National Association of Scholars applauds the decision by the American Bar Association (ABA) to suspend enforcement of its “diversity and inclusion” requirements. This is step short of abolishing these requirements altogether, but it is an important move in the right direction. It begins to put the ABA on the side of the United States Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC, and it begins to reconcile the organization with the Executive Order “Protecting Civil Rights and Expanding Individual Opportunity,” and the February 14 “Dear Colleague” letter from Craig Trainor, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education and Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964.
The ABA has for many years defied the American consensus in opposition to racial preferences in college admissions and faculty hiring. To many of us it has been plain all along that such preferences violate both the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. More broadly, Americans have come to recognize the inherent injustice of classifying people by race and dispensing opportunities according to those classifications. Until now, the ABA stubbornly refused to give up its commitment to racial preferences despite strong public criticism.
This matters because the ABA accredits America’s law schools. The ABA’s diversity and inclusion standards have pressured law schools into adopting and maintaining racial preferences. In other cases, the law schools themselves have championed racial preferences but have happily defended these groups set aside by citing the need to comply with the ABA. Either way, the ABA has played a pernicious role in the education of America’s future attorneys.
The American Bar Association must now move beyond suspending the enforcement of its misbegotten rules to the elimination of the rules themselves.
Photo by Chad McDermott on Adobe Stock
