By Karen Sloan
(Reuters) – Two major U.S. state bar associations have pushed back after President Donald Trump took aim at efforts to promote more diversity in the legal profession.
Trump in an executive order on Tuesday included state and local bar associations as targets for federal civil probes into private-sector diversity, equity and inclusion programs that may “constitute illegal discrimination or preferences,” along with medical associations, publicly traded companies and major nonprofits and universities.
The State Bar of California, the largest state bar in the country with more than 197,000 active members, said in a statement on Wednesday that the executive order will not affect its programs “as none of our work in this space involves illegal discrimination or preferences.”
The Massachusetts Bar Association’s president, Victoria Santoro, said the organization’s diversity efforts do not violate the law, adding: “I think there are better ways our federal government could use its time than looking at bar associations.”
The executive order, part of a wider push by Trump to roll back DEI in the public and private sectors, escalates pressure from conservatives on legal industry diversity programs that gained steam after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions.
Edward Blum, a conservative activist and architect of the Supreme Court affirmative action case, has challenged diversity programs in the legal profession. He said on Wednesday the new executive order should force bar associations to end sex and race quotas for board memberships and “may foreclose the need for further state-by-state legal challenges to these unfair and illegal policies.”
Bar associations are mandatory or voluntary groups, typically funded through member dues, that advocate for attorneys and sometimes oversee attorney licensing and discipline.
They have emerged in recent decades in many states as vocal proponents of diversity, creating programs to promote ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ lawyers and other underrepresented groups in leadership posts and throughout the legal profession. While those groups have steadily gained ground, whites make up 77% of American lawyers but only 60% of the U.S. population, according to the American Bar Association.
The American Bar Association and state and city bar groups in New York, Pennsylvania and Texas did not immediately respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.
Many state and local bar associations maintain fellowship or internship programs that place racially diverse law students in legal jobs, hold job fairs geared toward law students of color, or provide scholarships.
After the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on affirmative action, conservative legal groups sued or filed complaints against several bar associations and law firms over such programs, alleging they are discriminatory.
In 2024 the ABA revised the criteria for its longstanding program aimed at boosting the number of racially diverse judicial clerks to eliminate references to minority students and “communities of color” after a conservative legal group accused it of using illegal racial quotas.
The same year, the State Bar of Wisconsin modified a diversity program for law students after a conservative legal advocacy group sued, alleging racial discrimination.
Some prominent law firms, including Winston & Strawn and Morrison Foerster, altered their application criteria for diversity fellowships in 2023 after being sued by Blum.
The ABA, which has about 150,000 paying members and is the federally recognized accreditor of U.S. law schools, has made diversity and inclusion a core mission, making it a target of the anti-DEI movement.
A coalition of attorneys general from 21 Republican-controlled U.S. states has twice warned the ABA that its law school accreditation rules, which require schools to show commitment to diversity through recruitment, admissions and programming, are unlawful.
Some DEI rollbacks have come about without litigation. The Florida Bar last year ended all its diversity and inclusion initiatives after the state’s Republican-controlled Supreme Court ordered it to stop funding such programs, saying the organization must treat all members impartially and without bias.
(Reporting by Karen Sloan in Sacramento, California; Additional reporting by Sara Merken in New York, Mike Scarcella in Washington and David Thomas in Chicago; Editing by David Bario and Matthew Lewis)
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