Dear Chair Thies:
I have been a member of the American legal academy for over thirty years. Today, I hold the titles of Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis School of Law, and Distinguished Professor at Seattle University School of Law. I also serve on the board of the Critical Legal Collective, whose mission is to build partnerships, projects, and power to advance critical knowledge, freedom of expression, and democratic self-governance in higher education in general and the legal academy in particular. I have written about racial and gender inequality throughout my whole career, often with a focus on the academy. For instance, I am the co-editor of a book, PRESUMED INCOMPETENT: THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND CLASS FOR WOMEN IN ACADEMIA
(2012), which explores the many challenges faced by female faculty of color throughout higher education.
I wish to register my support for retaining—and strengthening—ABA Standard 206 as a crucial step in protecting the integrity of the legal profession in a democratic, multiracial society governed by the rule of law.
I entered the legal academy in the fall of 1988 as the first Black woman to be hired on the tenure track at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school. My hiring, I soon learned, was due in large part to sustained, courageous agitation by a dedicated group of students, the Coalition for a Diversified Faculty, who believed that Berkeley Law (then Boalt Hall) deserved a faculty that no longer excluded women and people of color from its tenure track.[1] Young and naïve as I was, I didn’t realize that my hiring was only the beginning of the struggle. For my entire career, despite my being awarded tenure early and winning awards for my teaching and mentorship, it has been impossible to ignore the headwinds of structural subordination. I have consistently received race-and gender-based comments on my student evaluations that manifest the presumption of incompetence. I have put up with disrespectful conduct from colleagues (from belittling comments about my intellectual capacity, to requests out of the blue for a barbecue sauce recipe or a song, to unwanted touching). Early in my career, I authored one of the most-cited law review articles in American history, and yet during my time there, I was the lowest-paid tenure-track faculty member at Berkeley Law. I learned from senior Black faculty at Berkeley outside the law school that for decades, the campus somehow managed to keep its numbers of Black faculty the same, despite the burgeoning numbers of promising Black candidates. And throughout my time as a law teacher, I have counseled brilliant, capable non-white, non-male students and colleagues who find themselves doubting their own competence and wondering whether there is a place in the law for them.
What has kept me in law teaching and kept me counseling students and junior colleagues to stay in the field as well, is my belief that the legal profession is too important to abandon to injustice. Even in this moment of jaw-dropping disregard for the rule of law within the very highest circles of government, it is legal actors and institutions that structure and implement our political economy and our society. Law is the code of markets. It is the language of political governance. It casts a shadow over our everyday lives as citizens, caregivers, workers, neighbors, consumers, and denizens of the natural world. For these reasons, law is too important to abandon to homogeneity. It is too important to abandon to complacency. For the United States to have the hope of achieving its aspiration to justice for all, legal education and the legal profession must be open and welcoming to everyone. We must make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to shape the rules under which we all live.
Standard 206 provides that (a) “a law school shall demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion by providing full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by members of underrepresented groups, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, and a commitment to having a student body that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity;” and (b) that “consistent with sound educational policy and the Standards, a law school shall demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion by having a faculty and staff that are diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.” This standard does not violate existing law. It is not “woke.” And it is not dispensable. It is a modest yet crucial foundation for creating a vibrant community of learners and critical thinkers, and for preparing lawyers to function in the heterogenous, contentious, unequal, messy world of the actually existing United States.
Last year, the writer Omar El Akkad published a book titled ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS. His book is about the slaughter in Gaza—not the current attacks on immigrants, Democrats, Muslims, women, queer, trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and people of color occurring within the territory of the United States. But his haunting title is apt. One day, when the current spasm of authoritarian madness is over, everyone will have always been against it. I urge the Council, even in this moment of frenzy, not to bend the knee but to stand up for what it purports to believe in. I urge the Council to reject the proposed repeal, and instead strengthen Standard 206.
Sincerely,
Angela P. Harris
Professor Emerita, University of California, Davis Distinguished Professor, Seattle University
- For an account of this period focusing on the story of gender discrimination at Berkeley Law and my senior colleague Eleanor Swift’s decision to fight back, see https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/fall-2020/swift-justice-berkeley-law-historic-fight-for-gender-equality. ↑