Diversity Corner: Is the Legal Profession Finally Ready for the Institutional Change Necessary to Yield Greater Diversity?
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal |
| Citation | Vol. 89 No. 6 Pg. 19 |
| Pages | 19 |
| Publication year | 2020 |
July 2020
by Carla D. Pratt
Dean and Professor of Law
Washburn University School of Law
For decades the legal profession in the United States has embraced diversity and inclusion as core principles. Yet little structural change has been made to remedy the continued exclusion and subordination of people of color in the legal profession. Even elite professions such as medicine, accounting and academia achieve more diversity in their professional ranks than the legal profession.[1] It's not that people of color aspire to be doctors, accountants or professors at a rate higher than they aspire to be lawyers. Based on the data, throughout the years that I have been in the legal profession, there have been plenty of people of color in the pipeline each year who wanted to be lawyers. The problem is that we lose them. We have been focused on the perceived deficiencies with the people that we lose in the pipeline to the profession, but from my vantage point the problem lies not in the people, but in the structure of the pipeline. We need to reimagine the pipeline to the legal profession so that we can restructure it in ways that afford more people from subordinated social groups a pathway to the profession.
When I conducted a study of the pipeline to the legal profession that focused on African-Americans, my Co-Investigator and I discovered that Black students were lost at every stage in the pipeline? Young Black students were lost in elementary school because they never saw a lawyer that looked like them and they couldn't imagine setting such a lofty goal for themselves. One Black male in the study said that he set his goal on being a paralegal. No one in his family had ever graduated high school so attending college and becoming a paralegal was a "big deal" to him and his family. It wasn't until a Black male lawyer came to speak to his paralegal class one day that he had the thought that he could be a lawyer. That one moment of seeing his own Black male identity represented in the legal profession as a lawyer told him that becoming a lawyer was not a pie in the sky dream; it was an attainable goal. But in law school he would confront a crisis of confidence when a law professor gave him feedback on his first legal writing paper and told him that he needed to work on a myriad of issues including subject verb agreement. He said that he didn't even know what subject verb agreement was because he had attended underfunded public schools in New York City where many of his teachers would play movies that they had brought from home rather than attempt to deliver a lesson from a lesson plan. Thanks to a strong academic support program in his law school, he was able to remedy those deficiencies, graduate from a well-respected law school and pass the NY bar on the first attempt. Today he is a very successful lawyer in private practice in New York City.
Black students were also lost in high school where they were ushered into coursework that would not adequately prepare them for college. Many Black students who made it to college were lost in college due to working for money while trying to complete college and finding themselves unable to devote the time to academics that is necessary for academic success. Those who made it through college and graduated...
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