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South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson signed onto a letter this week raising concerns about the American Bar Association (ABA)’s use of unlawful racial preferences in deciding which students are accepted into law schools across the country.
“Merit should be the criteria for law school admission, not racial preference,” Wilson said in a statement. “The U.S. supreme court already made it clear that law schools can’t admit students and hire faculty based on race, and yet the American Bar Association’s new standard is telling them to do just that.”
According to a press release from his office, Wilson joined a 21-state coalition of attorneys general in writing to the ABA’s legal education and admissions division, stating its revised “diversity and inclusion” standard failed to consider the supreme court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard – which determined institutions of higher education can no longer consider an applicant’s racial or ethnic status in admissions.
In that ruling, the court upheld the belief that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”
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In the letter, the attorneys general noted that the use of race in the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
“In its current form, the Standard all but compels law schools to consider race in both the admissions and employment contexts,” the letter says – as the ABA’s revised standard seems to ask law schools to defy the court’s clear directive against racial discrimination.
Such defiance will “burn the ABA’s credibility, jeopardize the educational institutions it evaluates and diminish the legitimacy of the law and the legal profession, the attorneys general noted.
The attorneys general urged the organization to revise its standard to “unambiguously reflect” that federal law prohibits race-based admissions and hiring – no matter its intended outcome.
“The supreme court has made clear that well-intentioned racial discrimination is just as illegal as invidious discrimination,” the attorneys general wrote.
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THE LETTER…
(Tennessee Attorney General’s Office)
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Erin Parrott is a Greenville, S.C. native who graduated from J. L. Mann High School in 2021. She is currently a senior at the University of South Carolina majoring in broadcast journalism. Got feedback or a tip for Erin? Email her here.
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8 comments
More culture wars from the defender of a convicted felon. Do some real work.
Why so angry? Biden paid for your transformation to a different sex, so you should be happy.
Whether there is any validity to this at all is lost by the fact it comes from the chief law enforcement officer of one of the most racist states in the nation. I mean SC literally started a war to preserve their ability to keep black people in chains. But add that to the fact he supports a President who has a history of racism and discrimination and it just becomes meaningless blather. The speaker of a thing matters, and I can’t be bothered to give this speaker any of my time on matters of racism and discrimination. He has no credibility at all.
Racism and discrimination can not be tolerated in a free society.
Anyone who thinks it is moral (not to mention productive for society) to favor one person or another based on pigmentation is racist. Period.
What kind of equipment is required to determine which pigment is superior to another? Was Idi Amin favorable to Sister Theresa? On what planet does racism make sense?
The end of these racial preferences is long overdue.
All that is easy to say, but we know racism and discrimination are in fact tolerated in our society. Unless you are saying our society is not a “free society.” We know racism continues to exist, and we know it’s directed at minorities, particularly black people.
What I hear you and our AG saying is it’s past time to stop trying to correct the racism against minorities by creating racial preferences for minorities. You are not actually calling for an end to racism, and if you are a Trump or Musk supporter, you have to be kidding me. Trump has always been a racist and Musk grew up a child of privilege in apartheid South Africa. He and Trump almost certainly would have been pro-Nazis in WWII, as Trump’s father was.
Totally agree!
The totally agree was directed at Thomas Blalik, certainly not Frank.
I love laughing at the trolls who call Trump, the GOP and his followers” racist” 365 days of the year for the last 8 years while his voting support of minorities has INCREASED in each national election from 2016, 2020, and 2024. The majority of Americans see through the hyperventilating bullshit propaganda machine. Like the spoiled brat wailing in the back of the van, these neo-marxists still get hauled to the destination that the adults are driving to, despite all their kicking and screaming. Hand me the popcorn.