Karen Sloan

(Reuters) - Two major U.S. state bar associations are fighting back after President Donald Trump committed to promoting greater diversity in the legal profession.

In an executive order on Tuesday, Trump named state and local bar associations as well as medical associations, public companies and major nonprofits as targets of a federal civil investigation into private sector diversity, Equity and inclusion programs and universities.

The California State Bar, the nation's largest state bar association with more than 197,000 active members, said in a statement Wednesday that the executive order will not affect its programs "because none of our work in this area involves Unlawful discrimination or preference.”

Victoria Santoro, president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, said the organization's diversity efforts do not violate the law, adding: "I think there are better ways our federal government can use its time than focusing on the bar."

The executive order, part of Trump's broader push to repeal DEI in the public and private sectors, intensifies conservative pressure on legal profession diversity plans to consider race in college admissions in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 decision. After factors, the plan gained support.

Edward Blum is a conservative activist and architect of the Supreme Court affirmative action case who has challenged diversity programs in the legal profession. He said Wednesday that the new executive order should force the bar to eliminate gender and racial quotas for board members and "potentially eliminate the need for further state-by-state legal challenges to these unfair and illegal policies."

A bar association is a mandatory or voluntary body, usually funded through membership dues, that advocates for attorneys and sometimes oversees attorney licensing and discipline.

In recent decades, they have become outspoken proponents of diversity in many states, developing programs to promote minorities, women, LGBTQ attorneys and other underrepresented groups into leadership positions and the legal profession as a whole. While the status of these groups has steadily increased, white people make up 77% of U.S. 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 have scholarship or internship programs that allow racially diverse law students to practice law, hold job fairs for law students of color, or provide scholarships.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2023 affirmative action ruling, conservative legal groups filed lawsuits or complaints against several bar associations and law firms over such programs, claiming they are discriminatory.

In 2024, after a conservative legal group accused the ABA of using illegal racial quotas, the ABA revised standards for its long-standing plan to increase the number of racially diverse judicial clerkships to eliminate discrimination against minority students and “people of color.” kind of community”.

That same year, the Wisconsin State Bar revised its diversity program for law students after a racial discrimination lawsuit was filed by a conservative legal advocacy group.

A number of prominent law firms, including Winston & Strawn and Morrison Foerster, changed their application criteria for diversity scholarships in 2023 after being sued by Blum.

The ABA, which has about 150,000 dues-paying members and is the federally recognized accrediting body for U.S. law schools, has made diversity and inclusion a core mission, making it a target of the anti-DEI movement.

A coalition of 21 Republican-controlled U.S. state attorneys general has twice warned the ABA that its law school accreditation rules, which require schools to demonstrate a commitment to diversity through recruitment, admissions and programming, are illegal.

Some DEI rollbacks are achieved without litigation. The Florida Bar ended all diversity and inclusion initiatives last year after the state's Republican-controlled Supreme Court ordered it to stop funding such programs, saying the organization must treat all members fairly 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)