Posted by on Friday, May 23, 2014
Welcome to this week’s Diversity Dish and Happy Friday! This week we are sharing a fun story out of North Carolina along with an update on how the LSAC has decided to deal with students who need more time on the LSAT due to a disability. As you move into the holiday weekend, don’t forget to register for the NALP / ALFDP Diversity and Inclusion Summit in Chicago on June 6! You can complete your registration here. Enjoy this week’s Diversity Dish, Happy Friday and if you aren’t already, follow us on Twitter @CourtneyDredden.
5.19.14 Phillip Craft writes on the Elon Law School website about the success of the school’s recent Diversity Week. The American Bar Association Center for Racial and Ethnic Diversity and the ABA Young Lawyers Division announced on May 17 that Elon Law’s student-led Diversity Week won first place in the annual Next Steps Diversity Challenge. The Next Steps Diversity Challenge encourages law school leaders, including law students, to start or strengthen programs that increase diversity in the educational pipeline to the legal profession. At Elon, Diversity Week “was comprised of educational events for law school community members to learn about issues faced by persons of different races, genders, religions, classes, sexual orientations and abilities. Programming included a Moot Court Board presentation about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education, a “Hot Topics” debate about school vouchers, featuring Elon Law professors Scott Gaylord and Andy Haile, and a “Bite of Culture” potluck lunch in which members of the law school community shared meals reflective of their home cultures.” Congratulations to Elon Law – what a great accomplishment!
5.21.14 Scott Jaschik writes in Inside Higher Ed on the LSAC’s recent decision to stop flagging the scores of students who get extra time on the LSAT due to a disability. The LSAC has also agreed to “streamline” its process for reviewing requests for extra time or other accommodations for those with disabilities. This comes as the result of a lawsuit filed against the LSAC by the Department of Justice, California Department of Fair Employment and Housing and three individuals. We wrote about the lawsuit in a previous Diversity Dish and are pleased to see that the suit has settled and those test takers will no longer be automatically flagged. Additionally, “the council pledged to adopt rules for “automatically granting most testing accommodations" for which "a candidate can show s/he has previously received for a standardized exam related to postsecondary admissions (such as the SAT, ACT or GED, among others).”