Upcoming elections could impact legal education, new AccessLex study says
The upcoming state elections could shape legal education, particularly related to diversity, equity and inclusion, according to a new report by the AccessLex Institute.
Later this year, 39 gubernatorial elections will happen in states where 21 governors are either term-limited or not seeking reelection, according to the National Governors Association. In addition, 46 states will have legislative races with 82% of the nation’s state seats up for grabs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Since 2023, more than two dozen states have passed laws restricting DEI in higher education, according to the AccessLex Institute’s report released in late May. Those laws have motivated dozens of public educational institutions to scrap or significantly cut back their DEI offices, says Madison Watts, a policy associate for research programs at the AccessLex Institute.
Depending on the results of the upcoming elections, more could follow, according to Watts, the report’s co-author, and that fallout could reshape student support, campus climate, classroom discourse and the pipeline into the legal profession.
State policies are often—but shouldn’t be—overlooked, says Joel Chanvisanuruk, the report’s co-author and the director of academic and bar exam success at the institute’s AccessLex Center for Legal Education Excellence.
“It’s so easy to focus on the national and the federal branches,” he says. “But when things get entrenched into state legislation, that has a longer permanence and impact than any of the federal.”
New state laws with an anti-DEI bent “tend to be vague, and they tend to be blunt,” Chanvisanuruk says. “As lawyers, we were trained to question vagueness as improper in legislation. But when it’s blunt, it shifts the onus and execution onto the law school itself, and it becomes really baffling.”
Some states, for instance, forbid co-sponsorship or co-mingling of funds for student organizations focused on identity, Chanvisanuruk says.
For example, a law school’s Black law students association might host a reception annually for current law students of color to meet alums.
The Black law students association “would put forward some of the organizing efforts and the funds, and the law school would give some money to buy meats and cheese and an in-kind donation of the law school space,” he adds.
Now, the language of these bills state that schools cannot have any role in that event, Chanvisanuruk says, with local law firms picking up the slack.
While these new state laws primarily target undergraduate programs, law schools with their own accreditation standards and professional development expectations have found themselves caught between state legislatures’ requirements and the accreditor, according to the report.
That was reflected in the heated debates surrounding the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar’s diversity standards. The council voted last month to repeal Standard 206, leaving DEI standards to the states.
The impact of DEI limitations could have an impact on those students aiming to go into public service.
“You are going to be representing diverse people—that is quite literally the entire purpose of public service,” Watts says. “How do you pursue immigration law, for example, if you can’t talk about DEI and diversity?”
Many law schools are embedded within larger universities, which often receive federal funding for a host of research, Chanvisanuruk says, and some have had those funds pulled since the start of the second Trump administration.
“To borrow from [The] Lord of the Rings, they don’t want the Eye of Sauron to suddenly be cast on their institution,” he adds.
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