ADI Book Series

This book provides a frame for engaging with the book series. Fundamentally, it introduces the book series and then moves to defining antiracism as a value focused on action. The volume introduces the reader to systems design and design thinking, and then it engages the reader in a discussion about the need to focus antiracism work on law and legal architecture. Forecasting the importance of active engagement with antiracism through exercises, the volume offers an illustration of antiracism work ongoing at Penn State Dickinson Law. Following this illustration, the topic of teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom sets the stage for broader application of antiracism to other institutions within and outside of law. In the last three chapters of the volume, readers receive information about what to expect from volumes one through eight, how to use the book series, and how to scale antiracism work to expand coalitions and extend the work outward to and for communities.

Antiracist Leadership will be devoted to constructing a frame for the type of leadership required to vision and plan for a systems design approach for “Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession.” Each of the authors will address a specific aspect of Antiracist leadership success, negative know-how derived from setbacks, change management techniques, and leadership dimensionality and positionality. This book will draw on the knowledge and experience of present and former law school deans, among others, who have engaged leadership development from both abstract and real spheres. In addition, contributions will be made by leaders of color who have had to forge leadership identity in legal academia using internal, liminal, and external forces to move a plan or a scenario in either expected or unexpected ways.

Antiracist Gateways to the Legal Profession is devoted to constructing a frame for explaining the purpose and the opportunities attendant with gateway programs that are designed to bring diverse students to law schools and the legal profession with the goal of reaching critical mass. Each of the authors will address one of the varied approaches to pipeline programs. Contributors will identify what is required to develop an Antiracist program that aligns with a law school’s vision and mission, how to design a program, how to assess the program, how to select and train participating faculty, which students to recruit and how to recruit them, how to recruit partners and sponsors to support the program, how to fund the program, and how to convert pipeline student participants into matriculating law students.

Antiracist Admissions is devoted to constructing a frame for addressing the recruitment efforts and selection process to attend law school for diverse students who are underrepresented in law school and in the legal profession. Although it may be a temptation to view issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education as solely a market issue, this book will demonstrate that Antiracist admissions and financial aid policies are an essential component of student representation and success. Data demonstrates the concept that diversity in higher education is critical to student achievement. As gatekeepers, law school admissions professionals must affirmatively enact practices that increase access for historically marginalized populations. Contributors will draw a causal connection between the importance of access and affordability and successfully onboarding diverse attorneys from underrepresented groups into the legal profession.

Antiracist Financial Aid focuses on the affordability aspects of law school admissions. Financial aid policies are an essential component of enrolling, retaining, and graduating racially minoritized law students in conversation with regulatory compliance and a shifting and dynamic socio-political climate. Law school admissions and financial aid professionals must interrogate those barriers to higher education access and draw upon best practices for the removal of those barriers and examine the disproportionate burden that diverse law school students experience in a meritocracy. Contributors to this volume will strike a balance between law school economics and increased affordability and access for diverse law students. Financial aid professionals must affirmatively enact practices that increase access for historically marginalized populations.

Antiracist Curriculum Development is devoted to constructing a frame for the type of candid assessment of the demanding and rewarding work that is required to implement an Antiracist curriculum. Contributors will discuss the following: what is required to teach and learn according to Antiracist pedagogy and best practices; the necessary investments in curricular policy and reform; and the bureaucratic processes and structures that support the establishment of required courses. Examples of these curricular innovations include the following: courses that address the history of racism and the concept of equal protection of the laws in the United States; adding J.D. degree requirements for every student; adding certificate programs in Civil Rights, Equal Protection, and Social Justice; and encouraging faculty to re-envision their courses to identify opportunities to integrate discourse about racial equality.

Antiracist Teaching and Learning is devoted to constructing a frame for legal educators, among others, to recognize the unique opportunity and important responsibility they have to train the type of lawyers needed to address structural racism throughout our legal system. The year 2020 has forced many in society to recognize painful realities about systemic and structural racism in America and how our legal system helps to maintain it. The fallacies in this Nation’s founding documents and the vestiges of this Nation’s slave past are so woven into national culture that they have become hard to see for those who are multi-privileged. 

Antiracist Academic Success and the Bar Examination is devoted to constructing a frame for the type of support, academic, and bar success programs that all law students require, especially students of color and students laboring through multilayered disproportionate disadvantage. Structural inequality is so prevalent and virulent in law schools that it has presented significant barriers to success for the many students who have been obscured and absented in legal education by systemic disadvantage.

Antiracist Career Services and the Legal Profession is devoted to constructing a frame for the type of leadership required to build an Antiracist legal profession using a systems design approach. To introduce this concept, contributors will focus discussion on the special duty of lawyers to reinforce the democratic ideals of equality, realism, and commitment supporting the rule of law. Specifically, this systems design approach requires looking at each function of the law school — admissions, financial aid, curriculum, teaching and learning, and career services to name a few — and each function of the legal profession — recruitment, formation of the lawyer’s professional identity, supervision, mentorship and sponsorship, development of subject matter expertise, client relationships and business development, retention and promotion, leadership development, and succession planning — to identify inequities and to act to eliminate them.

Antiracist Alumni Affairs and Advancement is devoted to constructing a frame for the type of philanthropic leadership required to have a meaningful impact on institutes, programs, and initiatives that take an others- or out-group-centered approach to improving lives and addressing inequities through access, education, and empowerment. Contributors will discuss how they have used their time, resources, knowledge, and networks to reimagine and then redesign how to support systemic equity. Contributors will discuss why this most recent era of social justice is truly a historic movement that will change the landscape of legal education, the legal profession, and a society that aims to live by the rule of law. They will also discuss how to leverage the MacKenzie Scott-form of unique giving that is turning the philanthropy industry inside out. This paradigmatic shift in giving benefits universities, but the question is how to transform law schools from edifices of systemic inequity to institutions promoting systemic equity so as to warrant investment during this new era of philanthropy.