Wokeness Is Creeping into Continuing Legal Education. Having escaped campuses, DEI initiatives are pursuing lawyers on their own turf.

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution doesn’t just affect colleges and universities. It’s already begun to extend itself into America’s professions, by way of professional licensing requirements. The American Bar Association, for example, now has diversity requirements, which it is imposing on law schools. But legal associations in different states are also imposing them on practicing lawyers by means of Continuing Legal Education (CLE).

CLE isn’t a national requirement. It’s a state-by-state patchwork. Some states impose none, and each state that does mandate CLE imposes a different requirement. Every lawyer in a CLE state is supposed to take a certain number of hours in CLE in a set number of years, to maintain their license. The requirements frequently include a mandatory core, often including legal ethics.

And now 11 states have made CLE in diversity mandatory: California (“At least two hours dealing with elimination of bias. Of the two hours, at least one hour must focus on implicit bias and the promotion of bias-reducing strategies”); Colorado (“at least two credit hours in the area of equity, diversity, and inclusivity”); Illinois (“one hour accredited for diversity/inclusion”); Maine (one hour of “Harassment and Discriminatory Education”); Minnesota (“a minimum of 2 elimination of bias credit hours”); Missouri (“At least one of the three ethics credit hours must be devoted exclusively to explicit or implicit bias, diversity, inclusion, or cultural competency”); New Jersey (“At least 2.00 credits must be in Diversity, Inclusion, and Elimination of Bias”); New York (one credit hour in “Diversity, Inclusion, and Elimination of Bias”); Oregon (“3.00 [credit hours in] Access to Justice, in alternate reporting periods”); Vermont (“1.00 [credit hour] – Diversity & Inclusion”); and Washington

“Funny how we don’t hear this is a problem from tons of lawyers. What does that say about our justice system?”

It says if you speak out you will lose your law license. Not unlike the medical profession threatening doctors not to speak out about the Covid vaccine.

Law and Medicine are self regulating professions. The leftist have taken over the bar associations and AMA so now they can lift licenses of lawyers and doctors who do not comply. Airline pilots and educators the same. Engineers and architects will soon be under the thumb of leftists controlling licensing.

Biden just issued new federal orders pertaining to “equity” in federal government hiring and promotion practices. The heavy hand of tyranny is now entrenched in the workplace and going forward your livelihood will depend on complying with the political whims and social justice thinking of the moment.

Small businesses were crushed by the government during Covid shutdowns, likely intentionally to eradicate places where workers who are independent thinkers can obtain employment. Expect the war on small business to continue through regulation, aggressive IRS actions, and frivolous lawsuits by government agencies and tort lawyers allied with the Democrat Party.

The pace of transition from a free republic to a one party totalitarian state is accelerating as every segment of society is falling under the control of the bureaucratic state.

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