Eliminating the terms “race and ethnicity” from the American Bar Association’s law school accreditation rules will hobble longstanding efforts to bring in diverse students and faculty, critics warned in public comments on the proposal.
The ABA, which sets accreditation standards for 197 law schools in the U.S., currently requires law schools to provide “full opportunities” for “racial and ethnic minorities” and have a diverse student body “with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.”
The proposed new standard—renamed the “access to legal education and the profession” standard—eliminates references to race, ethnicity and gender and instead requires law schools to provide access to “persons including those with identities that historically have been disadvantaged or excluded from the legal profession.”
A subcommittee of the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar spent months revising the standard after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 barred colleges and universities from considering race in admissions resulting from a pair of cases filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The council voted in August to gather public comments on the change through Sept. 30.
Many of the 10 public comments opposing the change said the ABA had gone further than the court’s ruling requires, while three comments supported the change.
“Nothing in the Court's ruling precludes schools from continuing to pursue diversity as an objective,” the law deans wrote in their opposition letter, adding that Supreme Court only limited the means by which schools may pursue their diversity goals. Deans from the law schools at the University of Michigan; the University of California, Berkeley; Vanderbilt; and Boston University are among the letter's signatories.
The LSAC said in its letter to the ABA that the revised standard would “undermine the progress that has been made toward fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in legal education.”
An ABA spokesperson declined to comment on the proposal on Wednesday.
A handful of people and groups submitted comments in favor of the revised standard, including a coalition of attorneys general from 17 Democratic-led states—though they encouraged the ABA to restore “diversity” to the name of the standard.
It’s not yet clear what impact the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban has had on the diversity of law classes. The ABA will not release detailed demographic statistics on the first law school admitted since the court’s ruling until December.
Early figures from some elite law schools offer clues, however. Half of the law schools ranked in the top 14 by U.S. News & World Report have disclosed some diversity figures, with five saying that their proportion of students of color either held steady or increased over last year.
However, Harvard Law School reported last month that the percentage of students of color fell from 51% in 2023 to 43% this year.
Read more:
ABA looks to strip 'race and ethnicity' from law school diversity rules
Harvard Law School says enrollment of students of color dropped after affirmative action ban
