How the DEI is coming for lawyers

This week, The Post’s editorial board rightfully lauded Christopher F. Rufo’s recent article in City Journal entitled “How DEI Corrupts America’s Universities.”

As the editorial board and Rufo correctly point out, America’s universities “use the idea of diversity to ‘justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, racial discrimination.’” Rufo highlights the University of Colorado Boulder’s DEI program as example, ridiculing it for teaching that “’Black, Indigenous and People of Color,’ or ‘BIPOC,’ students are failing because of ‘white supremacy culture.’”

Sadly, the corruption of DEI has spread to our law schools. In 2022 the ABA mandated DEI training even though Law schools had already added DEI curricula en masse .

But now . . . they’re coming for our lawyers. Since 2018, I and other licensed attorneys in New York are compelled to complete biannual diversity, equity, and elimination of bias training. Theoretically, such courses provide lawyers with tools to address thorny race-related issues within the field. But rarely is that the case.

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Instead, New York’s mandatory DEI trainings are purveying the same rank racial ideology found in our universities. These “educational” sessions teach that the profession has been corrupted by white people, and that white supremacist culture must be actively routed out of the practice of law to make progress.

In April, for example, the New York City Bar Association (NYCBA) presented me with an intellectually painful opportunity to earn the diversity credit required to keep my license. The class focused on “inclusive language,” enumerating the terms and words that the NYCBA now believes to be unacceptably “offensive.” What do these include?

Referencing the “criminal justice system” is now verboten because there’s not enough justice in the system. Don’t cite a “white paper,” because you’re implying that valuable things must be white. Also, instructed the training, “low hanging fruit” is now an inappropriate phrase (for reasons left dangling).

The purveyors of this new vernacular may think that, at worst, their canceling of words and phrases is harmless. But it’s not. Bandwidth for change is limited. I’ve written before about how onerous discovery reform and youth justice reform regulations have stymied the fair workings of the court system. Prosecutions are down and crime is up — and everyone is distracted and overworked.

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What was more frightening for me was training offered in September by Tanya Martinez Gallinucci, the NYCBA’s own executive director of the Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging. In a glowing profile last year for Law360, Gallinucci described herself as “a unicorn” for rising to her current rank despite growing up, she said, “at the crossroads between poverty and privilege” in public housing near Lincoln Center.

Gallinucci’s CLE lecture began by briefly reviewing the “harm” from last year’s Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in elite college admissions. Rather than providing an objective analysis of the debate around the decision — which would have helped a lawyer like me — Gallinucci professed that she is “haunted” by the word “fair” in the case’s title. There is “nothing fair” here, she admonished, to “marginalized folks.”

Gallinucci is not merely stating a personal opinion. As described in a recent Manhattan Institute report , Gallinucci released a lengthy statement on behalf of the entire city bar excoriating the SCOTUS decision. She further chastised registered attorneys that to right the Supreme wrong they needed to do “the work.”

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But what “work”? It’s all about dismantling “white supremacy,” she explained, which is propagated through fiendish concepts like “problem-solving” and “self-reliance,” as well as law firm policies banning abuses of work-from-home opportunities.

Not leaving it there, Gallinucci then showed a slide detailing more diabolical cultural attributes white people supposedly introduced into the workplace, including fear , objectivity , worship of the written word , and urgency . Her source for these is a website rant at http://www.whitesupremacyculture.info , where a collage of caucasians being slaughtered greets you on the homepage.

Compare this to the experience of an NYCBA member who last summer voiced concern about the effects of race-based affirmative action. Gallinucci’s office published his letter on its official NYCBA Instagram feed, with a condescending scolding that his opinions were not “fact based” and were “mired in wh*te s*premecy.” The Bar called his reality “skewed” and told its members that “this should concern you.” Ensuring no pushback, Gallinucci warned her students that an attorney who once suggested that “this conference was discriminatory” was handled .

The NYCBA was originally founded “in response to growing public concern over corruption in the justice system.” But its current curricula are divisive; they are not based on rigorous research; they are immune to challenge; and they are not actually education.

If we want to really “do the work” that Gallinucci proposes, let’s make these “uncomfortable conversations” that the DEI establishment demands into actual substantive debate, even if it requires using scorned “white supremacist” methods such as “objectivity.”  Until then, I am an attorney who feels my own DEI: distanced, excluded, and insulted by a bar association I once was extremely proud to join.

W. Dyer Halpern is the head of Delve Legal and author of the recent Manhattan Institute report “Reforming ‘Raise the Age.’ “

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