Conservative groups call on EEOC to investigate ABA diversity programs

By Karen Sloan

Feb 10 (Reuters) - A coalition of conservative legal groups on Monday asked the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate several of the American Bar Association’s diversity hiring programs, claiming they discriminate by giving priority to minority applicants and other underrepresented groups.

The EEOC complaint, which follows similar allegations against the ABA made by one of the groups last year, is the first direct legal challenge to the organization since Donald Trump returned to the White House and initiated a national push to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the government, the private sector and beyond. Among Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders was a directive to federal agencies to investigate such initiatives at bar associations, universities and companies.

The ABA declined to comment on Monday's EEOC complaint. The organization’s policymaking body last week passed a resolution urging the Trump administration to modify the executive order to recognize that bar associations’ diversity efforts are protected by the First Amendment.

The ABA, which has about 150,000 paying members and is the federally recognized accreditor of U.S. law schools, has made diversity and inclusion one of its four core goals.

Monday’s EEOC complaint was filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the Center for Equal Opportunity, and the American Civil Rights Project on behalf of an organization called Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences. That organization has unsuccessfully sued several flagship law journals over alleged discrimination in the selection of editors and articles and has a pending lawsuit against Northwestern University’s law school that claims it discriminates against white men in faculty hiring.

The EEOC complaint alleges that a series of ABA hiring programs, including its Diversity Clerkship Program, its Judicial Intern Opportunity Program, and its Business Law Fellows Program, violate federal non-discrimination laws because their selection criteria prioritizes race.

"It’s hard to imagine a clearer case of illegal behavior or an organization that should more clearly know better,” said American Civil Rights Project Executive Director Dan Morenoff in a prepared statement.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty in May filed a complaint against the ABA with the U.S. Department of Education claiming it was illegally discriminating by using racial quotas in its Judicial Clerkship Program, which was founded 24 years ago to help boost the number of minority judicial clerks.

The ABA subsequently modified the parameters of that program to say law schools are “encouraged to select a diverse group of students,” replacing language that called on schools to send between four and six students “from underrepresented communities of color.”

Those changes don’t go far enough to eliminate discrimination and other ABA programs have similar selection criteria, the conservative groups alleged in their EEOC complaint.

Read more:

ABA strikes 'minority' and 'of color' from clerkship criteria amid lawsuit threat

ABA opposes any DEI probes into bar associations