The American Bar Association is the entity that accredits law schools in this country. That accreditation is critical. In many states, students must graduate from an accredited law school to be eligible to sit for the bar exam.
The Wall Street Journal tells the story of George Mason University and how the ABA has required it to change its affirmative action policies in order to maintain its accreditation. These changes are not required for GMU to be in compliance with the law, but merely to be in compliance with the ABA’s arbitrary standard. According to The Wall Street Journal, GMU had significant minority outreach programs in place. It even accepted significant numbers of minority students, many of whom eventually chose to attend a different school. That was not enough for the ABA. The ABA required GMU to lower its standards in order to enroll what the ABA deems to be a sufficient number of minority students. If GMU is correct that these students run an unacceptable risk of not completing law school, the students will nonetheless be saddled with considerable debt from student loans.
Perhaps the ABA believes that the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger allows it to force law schools into affirmative action orthodoxy. If so, it is mistaken. In Grutter, a razor-thin majority held that the Constitution permitted the University of Michigan Law School to discriminate against whites and Asians to obtain a racially diverse class.
That decision, however, was rooted in the notion that “universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition.” In the majority’s view, universities are not subject to the same equal-protection standards as other governmental entities; they are instead entitled to deference in their academic judgments. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor put it, “‘[t]he freedom of a university to make its own judgments . . . includes the selection of its student body.’”
That freedom has been taken away by the ABA. The ABA, however, receives its authority to accredit law schools from the U.S. Department of Education. The federal government should not permit the ABA, as its designee, to impose a quota system that the government has no authority to implement and that runs counter to the law announced in Grutter.
April 28th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Law, Politics |
no comments
