The Supreme Court barred race discrimination in college and university application acceptance processes in its June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v President and Fellows of Harvard College. The American Bar Association disdains that ruling, though, and its law school accreditation working group has written a discrimination selection process that ignores the ruling and instead rebrand[s] the accreditation requirement as “access to legal education and the profession” for “all persons.”
Fourteen types of persons are named specifically. Law schools “shall” take “concrete actions” to show their commitment to access for those whose “identity characteristics … have led to disadvantages in or exclusion from the legal profession,” under the revised language.
It adds 11 new identities to gender, race and ethnicity, the underrepresented groups from the old version: color, religion, national origin, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, Native American tribal citizenship and socioeconomic background.
Similar changes were made to the section on faculty and staff
This is precisely the discrimination that the Supreme Court barred in Students, and it displays the arrogance and depth of Woke-ism into which the ABA has sunk. In response, William Jacobson, Cornell Clinical Professor and Director of the Securities Law Clinic and operator of Legal Insurrection, says
This reflects how the ABA is abusing its accreditation power to push its social agenda…. [Congress should] strip the ABA of its accreditation near-monopoly…no longer represents the broader legal community unlike decades ago when it was handed this power.
Jacobson is absolutely right. Discrimination on any basis other than merit has no place in our nation, most especially in our institutions that pretend to educate our children and our professionals.