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I thank the Utah Bar Journal for publishing the recent article "enlightening" us on the need for racial and gender equity.
It was good to overcome my "ignorance" and "limited vision" and learn that "ability instead of DNA predisposition and skin color" should determine one's place in the profession.
Consistent with that declaration, we are told that a goal mandated by the U.S. Constitution is that every community, vocation, and endeavor must have the same racial and gender composition
as the population at large. Perhaps, though, the forefront of this battle to impose "diversity" should not be the use of quotas in the legal profession, but the use of
such measurements in areas more publically visible and important to the American consciousness.
Let's start first with professional sports. White males are underrepresented in football, basketball, and boxing.
Let's fix that. Then there's crime control. Women are underrepresented in prison. Let's release some men, and pull more women in from probation and diversion programs so we can achieve some equity. Fix what is most important to Americans, and the rest will follow.
As part of the legal profession's particular effort to bring about equality of result rather than equality of opportunity, we should mandate ideological reeducation through
"mandatory" CLE on the virtues of reverse discrimination.
Coupling this effort with the call for a national law to punish not criminal actions (which are already illegal), but improper thought, a "national Hate Crimes Act" should completely silence anyone different from us. Policing thought is the ultimate goal.
Although there will be some--including, unfortunately, minorities and women--who see that diversity is not the opposite of discrimination, our tolerant society has "no room" for
such people in our effort to embrace everyone and everything.
Instead, we must curtail the very liberties that make our own efforts possible. Then we can force people of color to embrace our profession even though some have other goals. We can require more women to work at desks rather than at home or elsewhere. We can meet the quotas created by the enlightened few who understand better than each individual the sort of choices we should be free to make.
Paul Wake
I would like to respond to Diane Abraham's article on "diversity in the legal profession" in the October 2002 Journal. As an Asian-American who has had offices in Maryland,
Virginia, Omaha, San Francisco, Tokyo, Washington, and Idaho, in 24 years of legal practice, I have observed a large cross section of the legal profession. Yet I have not observed the
kind of pervasive and "perverted" racial and gender bias that Ms. Abraham claims exists in our profession. After all, we baby boomers who came of age with the civil rights and
feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s are now getting into our 50s and are becoming the managing attorneys in law firms and corporate and government offices across the country. Even
as long ago as 1975, my freshman class at the University of Utah College of Law was already one third female, and women were the majority of the Utah Law Review staff my senior year. I
therefore find it incredible that anyone could seriously claim that America's legal professionals are biased against women or members of racial minorities, particularly to an extent that
"mandates" that we forcibly alter the racial or gender makeup of law firms, institutional law offices, courts, or law schools. What I have observed instead is that a lot of
bright people have made the free choice to enter the legal profession, while a lot of other bright people (such as my children) have decided they can get more job satisfaction with an
MBA, an MD, an engineering degree, or a lot of other career alternatives. An attorney who believes she or he is being discriminated against doesn't need a lot of help in knowing how to
contest unequal treatment, but such cases are rare. In the modern competitive legal environment, attorneys are measured by the quality of their work and their ability to keep old clients
loyal and obtain new business. Any law firm that refuses to hire and promote talented attorneys due to prejudice will lose clients and money to those who are free of such bias. The free
market is the best guarantee of equal treatment based on merit. I see that freedom operating in our profession, and not a system based on bigotry. Those like Ms. Abraham who think the
Equal Protection Clause should be tempered with social engineering are attacking our freedom.
Raymond Takashi Swenson
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