Eliminating the terms “race and ethnicity” from the American Bar Association’s law school accreditation rules will hobble longstanding efforts to bring in diverse students and faculty, critics warned in public comments on the proposal.

Trauma-Informed Law According to the authors of Trauma-Informed Law: A Primer for Lawyers Resilience and Healing,  “a key concept for trauma-informed lawyering is the shift that has occurred, …

Lloyd Lionel Gaines applied to the University of Missouri School of Law in 1936. Despite an outstanding scholastic record, Gaines was denied admission based solely on the grounds that Missouri’s Constitution called for “separate education of the races.” Because Missouri had no public law school that admitted Black applications, state law required the state to pay Gaines’ tuition at public universities in Iowa, Kansas or Nebraska. Attorneys from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) identified Gaines’ case as a good vehicle to begin the incremental process of challenging the ignominious precedent of “separate but equal” established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Together, they sued the University of Missouri seeking an order granting him admission to its Law School.

"Homeless Advocacy examines the role legal advocacy plays in preventing and ending homelessness. The book provides a history of homelessness, the current state of it in the United States, context on working with unhoused populations, and analyzes the legal issues they face through a practitioner's lens. With these topics, ranging from criminalization of homelessness to employment barriers and affordable housing, the author provides a resource that will encourage and enable more people to advocate on behalf of unhoused populations and will serve as a guidepost to advance that advocacy. There are many books on poverty, but this book is different and complementary as it focuses on the unhoused population and the legal challenges unique to them. It is aimed at law students, policy, and social work students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and individual activists. It includes narratives from practitioners and those with lived experience of being unhoused"--

Three law schools have managed to comply with the American Bar Association’s (ABA) accreditation standard requiring a two-year bar passage rate of at least 75%. The ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recently announced that Ave Maria School of Law, the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School […]

February is Black History Month, and the Muse Law Library is proud to present our celebration of Black achievement in the law. Here you will find the full collection of the 47 slides exhibited throughout the Library this month, each one documenting a different Black trailblazer or icon. The people featured here all displayed resounding courage and perseverance as they struggled against injustices and abuses at the hands of an oppressive, bigoted system. You will find lawyers and judges, writers and artists, and civil rights activists all connected by the common thread of a dedication to racial justice.

"Standard legal ethics courses long considered dry and theoretical by many students have experienced a renaissance over the past two years due to the pandemic and an increased focus on social justice."

Compiled resources from Harvard Law Review.

"Race Racism And The Law considers race racism and racial distinctions in the law. It examines the role of domestic and international law in promoting and/or alleviating racism. This website makes law review scholarship (and related material) more accessible to community activists students and non-legal faculty."

"In June 1951 five African Americans Harvey E. Beech James L. Lassiter J. Kenneth Lee Floyd B. McKissick and James R. Walker enrolled in classes at the University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill ("Carolina Law")."

"A lawyer's cultural competence goes beyond avoiding bias. To serve diverse clients lawyers should have special communication and interpersonal skills. Those skills can be taught and learned."

"American jurisprudence and law have profoundly shaped defined and constrained the lives of Black people for over 400 years. Racial inequality has extremely deep roots in American society and our Constitution statutes court cases and regulations not only bear witness to this but are often the source of it. This timeline provides an overview of some of these laws beginning with the first known case marking the legal difference between Africans and Europeans in 1640 in Virginia and continuing with laws recently introduced in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans. While not exhaustive the timeline focuses on a number of key legal events and actions that have structured and systematized racism in America."

"Law Schools and Bar associations are sharing some excellent stories as part of black history month."