We prominently display in our moot courtroom a profound statement by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We not only believe in this maxim but acknowledge that the bending of the arc will not happen without thoughtful action in pursuit of justice.
The S.J. Quinney College of Law community recognizes the systemic racial injustice and implicit bias that plagues our nation. We are especially saddened and enraged by the ongoing killings of Black Americans under the color of law and understand that racial profiling contributes to the racial gap in our system of mass incarceration. As an example, we can look to the experiences of the Black and African American communities within the United States for instances of racial injustice and implicit bias. We acknowledge that compounding discriminatory practices have prevented the Black community from thriving: 246 years of chattel slavery, the 1921 Tulsa Massacre which decimated Black Wall Street, subsequent discriminatory policies throughout the 20th century including the Jim Crow Era’s Black Codes, the murder of James Byrd, Jr., and the killing of George Floyd. These facts help us to understand what civil justice leaders have asked us to comprehend for generations—that systemic exclusion and injustice against Black people will not go away without action. We also acknowledge that many other communities in the United States suffer racial injustice and implicit bias, such as Latinx, Asian, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities. We use the foregoing as examples of why it is so important to confront systemic racism.
As Dean Kronk Warner has said: “It is not enough to lament what we are seeing with the expectation that justice may eventually prevail. We believe that we, as members and future members of the legal profession, all have a distinct role to play in making America’s future better than its past.”
As a law school we work together to address racial and social inequities with the following actions:
