Reflections on our reflection
By Jeff Bleich
President, State Bar of California
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Bleich |
In the State Bar’s board room, there’s a wall lined with a portrait
of every past State Bar president. While no one portrait tells us much, the
reflection of all of those portraits on one wall reveals a lot about where
we have been as a profession and where we have yet to go. Most of what’s
distinctive are matters of fashion — T.P. Wittshen and O.D. Hamlin probably
wouldn’t have taken the nicknames “T.P.” and “O.D.” these
days, and the presidents from the ’70s likely would have more tasteful
eyewear. But one things stands out: although clothes, and hairstyles, and glasses,
and photographic quality change, year after year, portrait after portrait remains
of white men.
You can’t look at that wall for long without wondering what the bar
and what this profession lost decade after decade. All of the talented men
and women who were excluded from practicing law, or from the bar, or from leadership
because of their race, their gender, their orientation, their disability. Decade
after decade, our profession was deprived of their talents because of a culture
of narrow-mindedness and bigotry.
While the portraits in the last few rows change a little, it is only a little.
Outside the building, on the sidewalks and in the stores and restaurants nearby,
men and women of every race, ethnicity and physical disability are doing every
sort of job. But when we go to meetings of lawyers — whether it is local
bar meeting, or a court calendar, or to see the next class of bar members sworn
in, our group looks different. We have not come close to reflecting the sort
of diversity that exists everywhere else in our society. While members of other
professions such as doctors, CPAs and civil engineers increasingly resemble
the populations they serve, the legal profession does not. White males constitute
only 44 percent of California’s population, yet they are 81 percent of
the lawyers here. Despite all the talk about diversity, the trend is that the
percentage of minority lawyers is either falling or rising at a slower pace
relative to their population.
Other professions have diversified faster not because those professions are
more altruistic than ours. Partly, they’ve been more responsive to market
pressures. CEOs of companies, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or anyone
who runs a complex organization understands that in a competitive world — a
flattening world — you’ll fall behind if senseless barriers inhibit
the best and brightest of every race or gender or orientation or ethnicity
from entering and remaining in that industry. The legal profession is insulated
from some of that pressure because — unlike, say, medical treatments
or the laws of physics — laws vary from state to state, and training
in one state doesn’t necessarily translate to another. So lawyers are
less mobile and less subject to competition from overseas or other states.
But other competitive pressures to diversify should be driving our profession
to diversify — ones that go to our competence and our credibility. The
job of a lawyer is as much about understanding people as it is understanding
what is written in a book somewhere. Legal problems are blind to race or gender:
they happen to all people regardless of their backgrounds and experiences.
And juries, too, reflect all of our society, not just the part of society that
has tended to produce lawyers. The public — whether litigants, witnesses,
jurors or just taxpayers — depend upon a profession that draws from across
the whole breadth of society. To serve this community at all levels, we need
to be trained and to practice in an equally rich and diverse environment. It’s
not just that eliminating arbitrary barriers will allow better lawyers into
the profession; it is that all of us will practice better if our profession
is in touch with the full range of human experience.
This is also an issue that goes to our credibility. How can the public trust
us to guard their constitutional right to equal opportunity for all, when in
one of the most diverse states in our nation, the California bar remains overwhelmingly
white and male? How can we expect them to believe we’ll protect their
right to equal access when our own ranks do not reflect that access?
Until recently, it has been easier for the profession as a whole to make excuses
than to find solutions. If you ask the firms why they have so few minorities,
they say it is because there are so few minorities graduating from law schools.
If you ask the law schools, they blame the colleges. And the colleges blame
K-12. There is some truth to all of this, of course. At current rates, for
example, 50 percent of African American and Latino 9th graders in San Francisco
will not graduate from high school. Even fewer will go on to college. So the
pipeline starts leaking in middle school, and by the time you reach the end
of the pipe, there’s only a trickle.
Yet it is not enough to simply look for excuses. When we have a problem in
business or in our lives that keeps us from doing our job, we don’t just
wait for something to happen, we fix it ourselves. In the past few years, many
lawyers and local bar associations have stepped up to this challenge. Instead
of standing at the end of the pipeline complaining about the lack of diversity
flowing to us, they are out there trying to fix the pipeline where minority
candidates leak out. The Bar Association of San Francisco, for example, has
a sequence of programs that start in the middle schools and give children in
low-income minority communities exposure to the legal system, summer jobs in
law firms, training in the law academy, help getting into college and scholarships
to law school when they graduate. A new program pioneered by public agencies,
such as the California Public Utilities Commission, and private businesses
like CalPERS seeks to take this effort statewide.
The State Bar has a Web site listing best practices and other resources. Over
the past year, law academies have sprung up in Los Angeles and other cities
as well to give students in poor neighborhoods their first exposure to being
a lawyer, find them summer jobs in law firms and provide volunteer lawyers
to act as counselors to help them get into college. And now, through the California
Bar Foundation, these young people can get $5,000 and $10,000 scholarships
to help them attend law school once they graduate.
We have a long way to go, but there are promising signs ahead. All three of
the people who are running to be the State Bar president next year are exceptional
women. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized diversity in legal education as
a compelling state interest. And while 50 years ago, Strom Thurmond ran for
president based on a platform of using our laws to again subjugate African
Americans, today one of the two candidates to be president of the United States
is an African American lawyer. In short, the world is changing around us, and
it will take all of our effort to reflect that change as a profession.
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