At the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, the Charleston School of launched its renamed and reorganized Center for Diversity in the Legal Profession.1 Led by co-directors representing faculty, the admissions office, and academic affairs, the Center will serve to help recruit, retain, and support students from all backgrounds who have overcome obstacles on their journey into the legal profession, including barriers related to identity-based discrimination.2

In the 2023 case, SFFA v. Harvard,3 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that admissions programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (“UNC”) and Harvard College violated the equal protection clause on the grounds that the consideration of race as a stand-alone criteria in admissions is a form of racial discrimination.4 By holding affirmative action to be illegal, the Court majority clarified that the Constitution only allowed for college applicants to be evaluated on the basis of their individual experiences without separately considering their racial identity.5

This tension between mitigating exposure and broadening diverse recruitment efforts is especially palpable in the educational pipelines essential to the legal profession in South Carolina. Law schools must navigate a now more complex terrain, forced to weigh the benefits that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives yield6 against legal exposure because of litigious organizations such as the American Alliance for Equal Rights targeting programs that purport to address racial disparities by accounting for race.7

There is no straightforward nor universally applicable answer to this issue, but there are institutions and individuals actively working to be part of the solution. Only by the intentional and continued efforts of these individuals and institutions will current disparities8 in representation in the legal profession in South Carolina, racial and otherwise, cease to exist in truth and in fact.

The government has left it up to private individuals and institutions to address diversity and representation disparities in particular professions. It is incumbent upon the South Carolina Bar and law schools like the Charleston School of Law to continue to invest in and promote the cultivation of future attorneys who will reflect the diversity of all South Carolinians within the legal profession. Only with the continued efforts of attorneys, law firms, members of the Bar, and law schools will it be possible to continue to develop the South Carolina Bar into one which is more diverse, more representative, more reflective of every South Carolinian.

The Center for Diversity in the Legal Profession may be a small step for this one school, but it is this student’s hope that the Center will prosper and grow in its mission to become a leap forward in leading efforts to help future attorneys in South Carolina better reflect and better serve the legal needs of all people of South Carolina.

If you would like to read more about diversity in the legal profession, please check out these books from the Sol Blatt, Jr. Law Library:

Diversity Realized: Putting the Walk with the Talk for Diversity in the Legal Profession by Sarah E. Redfield (ISBN: 9781600420962). [Call Number: KF287 .R43 2009]

Moving Diversity Forward: How to Go from Well-Meaning to Well-Doing by Verna A. Myers (ISBN: 9781614380061). [Call Number: KF300 .M94 2011]

What if I say the wrong thing?: 25 habits for culturally effective people by Verna A. Myers (ISBN: 9781614389729). [Call Number: KF300 .M944 2013]

Jessica A. Hernandez

2024-2025 Sol Blatt Jr. Law Library Research Fellow
J.D. Candidate, Class of 2025
Charleston School of Law

  1. Annual Convocation officially marks the beginning of new year – Charleston School of Law (charlestonlaw.edu) ↩︎
  2. Id. ↩︎
  3. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harv. Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 143 S. Ct. 2141 (2023) ↩︎
  4. Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action programs in college admissions – SCOTUSblog ↩︎
  5. Id. ↩︎
  6. Advancing Diversity in the Legal Profession – Center on the Legal Profession (stanford.edu) ↩︎
  7. Our Cases | The American Alliance for Equal Rights ↩︎
  8. September 2024 SC Bar self-reported demographic data for members indicates that of the more than 18,000 members of the South Carolina Bar, fewer than 900 voluntarily identify as African American. Less than 5% of the SC Bar identifying as African American compared to 26% of South Carolinians identifying as African American reported by the U.S. Census Bureau suffices to show one example of a disparity in representation within the legal profession in South Carolina for a historically marginalized demographic. ↩︎