Watchdog Warns Law School Gatekeeper Could Use ‘Sleight-Of-Hand’ To Conceal DEI Mandate

An education watchdog is urging America’s law school accreditor to end rather than hide its policy requiring law schools to embed DEI in their curricula.

Defending Education (DE) called for the American Bar Association (ABA) to repeal a policy that requires law students to study DEI, according to a press release Monday. Sixty-two law schools appear to still follow that policy as of April, DE previously reported.

The ABA did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

ABA’s Standard 303(c) required law schools to include “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” in their graduation requirements, according to DE. The ABA proposed repealing the rule on May 20. The public comment period for the proposed repeal ended Monday.

Meanwhile, the ABA has not disclosed how it plans to change a different section of its standards, Section 302. DE warned that the ABA could use this as an opportunity to hide the original standard, and encouraged the ABA to prevent this by providing its own notice-and-comment period for the revised language.

“Rightly, the ABA has seen the error of its ways and has proposed rescinding the legally suspect standard in favor of a yet-to-be-drafted standard on ‘communicating effectively with a wide range of individuals,'” DE Vice President Sarah Parshall Perry said in a statement to the DCNF. “As the sole federally recognized accreditor of American law schools, the ABA’s influence on future lawyers cannot be overstated. Our hope is that the Association doesn’t engage in simple sleight-of-hand by shoehorning progressive orthodoxy into law schools under a different name.”

University of Wisconsin-Madison required first-year law students to fill out a worksheet asking them to identify their own “racist” personal beliefs and behaviors, according to DE’s comment. University officials allegedly confirmed to DE that session was intended to fulfill Standard 303(c).

“From the outset, Standard 303(c) operated as an ideological mandate in American law schools, tying the hands of educators and administrators in how they might best prepare students for the practice of law in favor of two sets of instruction on ‘bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,'” Perry stated.

The ABA began rolling back its apparent DEI policies in February 2025, after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the DCNF previously reported. President Trump signed an executive order in April 2025 calling on the U.S. Department of Education to investigate whether the federal government should suspend the ABA’s accreditation powers over DEI.