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It’s Not Your Daddy’s Bar Association I
went to grade school in the Deep South, in a world where racism and
segregation visibly and immediately affected everyday life, and where
some people even embraced them openly. But I am writing this column
as the nation is celebrating a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King
Jr. Between then and now for me lie thousands of miles, four decades,
a law degree, and a generation and a half in which Dr. King’s work
and message have begun taking root and have helped us as a nation
begin outgrowing institutionalized racism (and, hopefully, outgrowing
the more subtle kinds too). But the work of civil rights, of diversity,
inclusion, pluralism, and tolerance are far from finished, no less
in the bar association than anywhere else in our world. The
face of the bar is changing. The era in which the Association was
founded, a century and a quarter ago, was a far different day. There
was then a quaint custom of a community’s entire bar sitting for a
portrait, and you can still find such photographs—a few dozen lawyers,
sitting all solemn and stern, and all male and white. Today’s bar
far better reflects the society that we serve, which is far from all
male and far from all white. But
the face of that society is changing even faster than the face of
the bar. With apologies to Dr. King, while the society becomes more
diverse “with jetlike speed,” the bar and most law firms still “creep
at horse-and-buggy pace” toward real diversity in terms of gender
and race. We had better get busy catching up: if the demographic trends
of the 20th century continue into the 21st, as they apparently will,
then we will soon live in an America where citizens of non-Hispanic
European descent are themselves (ourselves, really, since I count
myself in that category1) a minority. We will live in an America where
the women not only outnumber the men, as they already do, but where
women head households and direct the economy in proportion to their
strength in the population. We will live in an America where the bar
looks so little like the society that it serves that the difference
will threaten the relevance of the legal profession in that society. The
Minnesota State Bar Association and Minnesota’s district bars have
historically taken a lead, as bar associations go, in honoring and
building diversity in our leadership and membership. A decade and
a half ago, the Association (led by a task force headed by Judge Nancy
Dreher and Jarvis Jones, who later became MSBA President) adopted
the “Glass Ceiling” report, which examined the legal community’s record
on diversity and found it wanting; proposed goals in response to that
record and timetables for measuring progress; established committees
and other mechanisms for the bar’s continuing involvement in combating
the glass ceiling; and inaugurated an era of raised consciousness
about diversity and a close and harmonious relationship between the
“mainstream” bar and the specialty bars, whose focus was diversity
in general or a particular minority within the legal community. Over
the next decade, the idea of “diversity” evolved and grew, reaching
beyond gender and race to sexual orientation, disability, and religion.
After a decade, though, the zeal that surrounded the Glass Ceiling
report had waned, and the community’s law firms could show little
progress toward effectively welcoming lawyers of color into their
ranks. Diversity had not stopped being a policy, but it had become
less of a priority. The MSBA Task Force on Diversity in the Profession
concluded in September 2006 that “while much work has been done in
the area of diversity, significant progress still must be made.”2
Last year, MSBA member Phil Duran wrote about “Invisible Minorities
in the Legal Profession,” illustrating new dimensions of diversity
and the related challenges.3 Two
Association committees are actively addressing the ongoing challenges
of diversity in the legal profession: the MSBA Diversity Committee,
chaired by Marta M. Chou; and the Diversity Implementation Task Force,
cochaired by Daniel’la Deering and former MSBA President Susan Holden.
The Diversity Committee “assists the bar in advancing a culturally
diverse workplace for the practice of law in Minnesota” and “promotes
opportunities for minorities in the legal profession.” The task force
is working to “provide law firms, law schools, corporations, legal
aid organizations, public law offices, and courts with practical strategies
and tactics they can use to increase the effectiveness of their diversity
efforts.” We look forward in hope that their work will narrow the
gap between principle and practice, and bring our profession closer
with each passing year to the diverse, inclusive, tolerant world to
which we aspire. Honoring
and building diversity in the legal profession is a necessary function
of a bar association that wants to remain relevant to its members
and their clients. I thank Marta, Dani, Sue, and the other members
who have helped the organized bar fulfill this critical mission.
2 The full report is available online at www2.mnbar.org/committees/DiversityTaskForce/index.htm. 3 The article was published in the June 2007 issue of
the NALP Bulletin, and is
available online on the same webpage as the task force report (see supra note 2). BRIAN MELENDEZ
is president of the Minnesota State Bar Association and a partner
in the law firm of Faegre & Benson LLP. He received his undergraduate
and law degrees cum laude, as well as a master’s degree in |
