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DIVERSITY MODEL PROGRAMS AND PRACTICES

Law Firms | Bar Associations | Corporation | Law Schools

Law Schools

A. Commitment to Diversity

• Dean of law school serves as role model and champion of diversity by actively providing direction and leadership to promote diversity, creating educational environment fostering diversity, creating and implementing school-wide action plan, with measurable goals, communicated to the entire law school and monitored and updated annually.

• Dean publicizes policy of equality of opportunity in legal education without discrimination for all persons.

• Perform a study of the relative success of past graduates of color as compared to their white peers. (see, e.g., University of Michigan Study in Law Quadrangle News, Vol. 42, No. 2, Summer 1999).

• Allocate funding necessary to compete effectively for the best students of color.

• Sponsor or co-sponsor bar exam preparation courses at a discounted rate or free for students of color.

• Encourage law students of color to seek academic careers after graduation from law school.

• Establish programs to include law students of color in professorial recommendations for judicial clerkships and academic positions.

• Institute a mentoring program with local junior and senior high schools and colleges to attract people of color to the legal profession.

B. Admissions

• Where not legally prohibited, implement and strengthen affirmative action programs that explicitly take race/ethnicity into account.

• Do not overly-rely on the LSAT. Use admissions criteria relevant to education of students and ability to succeed in the practice of law. Give all applicants the opportunity to provide information relevant to your admissions criteria. Evaluate all applicants and consider each applicant individually. (see, LSAC's September 1999 publication, "New Models to Assure Diversity, Fairness and Appropriate Test Use in Law School Admissions", "Merit Aware Alternative", discussed in the Indiana Education Policy Center's "Policy Bulletin", October 1999, No. PB-25 and AALS's "Recommended Practices That Help Achieve Diversity in Law Schools")

• Perform personal interviews of applicants without providing LSAT and GPA's in advance. (see University of Virginia and Northwestern)

• Develop a program along the lines of the Georgia Law School Consortium Fellowship Program where applicants identified by deans as promising, though not admitted, are invited to go through a summer institute, and take exams. Students who pass the exams are then admitted to the Georgia Law School. (Indiana has a similar program that is funded by the state legislature. Georgia is seeking legislatively authorized funding.)

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C. Faculty Advancement

• Adopt short and long-range goals for hiring, retention and tenure of a critical mass of faculty and administration officers of color.

• Utilize broad definitions of merit to embrace qualities predictive of success for professors of color, and implement a strategy for establishing a hospitable environment where faculty of color can do their best work.

• Do not push professors of color into dead-end, non-tenure positions.

• Provide mentoring by senior and influential tenured faculty. (see Mentoring under Law Firms and Corporate Employers of Lawyers.)

• Careful selection of internal review committees and outside review panels that are balanced and fair.

• Provide timely disclosure to tenure candidates of substance of serious criticism of their work that may jeopardize their opportunity for tenure. (see Evaluations under Law Firms and Corporate Employers of Lawyers.)

D. Student Advancement

• Establish tutoring and mentoring programs for students of color within the school and in cooperation with local minority and young lawyers' divisions and diversity committees of metropolitan bar associations.

• Ensure that curriculum is inclusive of issues relevant to minority students including for example civil rights, employment and educational discrimination, and critical legal studies approaches to racism.

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