NELA

Empowering Workers' Rights Attorneys

DEI

DEI

NELA President’s Reflections on Black History Month

As we come to the close of Black History Month, it is important to reflect upon and recognize both the singular achievements of, and the unique and central role played by Black people in our nation’s cultural, intellectual, political, and legal history. At NELA, we should take this opportunity to do the same for our incredible colleagues. Today, I honor one such colleague very close to my own heart—Carla Brown, NELA’s first Black woman president. Carla is a force, a fearless leader, and seriously fun. There are few people I have ever met who are as thoughtful as Carla. I often say, that while many of us find ourselves playing checkers, Carla is always playing chess. I have been so honored to serve on the NELA Executive Board with her and to count her not only as a trusted colleague but, most importantly, as a valued friend.

Carla’s professional achievements speak for themselves. She is a partner at Charlson Bredehoft Cohen Brown & Nadelhaft, P.C. in Reston, Virgina. She regularly and successfully tries cases in Virgina, Washington D.C., and Maryland with outstanding results, for which she has been widely recognized. She has been featured as one of Virginia’s Go To … Read More

Appreciating Mental Health Awareness Month

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. May 6–10 was Well-Being in Law week. Like any good lawyer, the author of this took on more than he should have and did not write this in time to publish it that week.

Living in this world is hard. Being a lawyer is hard. Being a lawyer representing people who have been sexually harassed or had their wages stolen from them is hard. It’s easy to let the difficulties of our jobs and our lives take over.

Law school does not teach you how to be a lawyer. It especially does not teach you how to deal with the stress, vicarious trauma, and burnout that comes with being a lawyer.

Dealing with stress may come naturally to you. You might fish on the weekends, vacation to other countries, or do yoga. Dealing with stress may also be as stressful as the stress itself. Yoga gives me anxiety. Vacations give me anxiety. I should give fishing a chance.

Our clients hire lawyers because we are professionals who know how to handle their problems. I have a therapist because I don’t know how to handle my own problems. I take medication because my therapist doesn’t … Read More

Recommitting to diversity, equity, and inclusion

In the wake of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits against Major League Baseball, Fortune 100 companies, and law firms over their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, NELA reiterates its commitment to those essential values. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are part of NELA’s core values and essential to the achievement of our mission. When applied in unison, diversity, equity, and inclusion create meaningful representation and involvement of persons with varied backgrounds, experiences, identities, and abilities in every aspect of NELA’s work, each with the opportunity to make robust contributions to the organization without discriminatory barriers. NELA champions the culture of participation and equal opportunity that is woven into the fabric of our mission and vision for workers and workplaces nationwide.

NELA encourages its members to continue to do the hard work of advancing workers’ rights and fostering diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces, including their own. NELA is working with a consultant to help make its own policies and practices more inclusive and equitable and is in the process of revamping its election process and the application to run for the board of directors. Maintaining its organizational commitment to DEI, NELA will continue this work to ensure best practices and to continually … Read More

Categories: DEI

Professionalism as a Racial Construct

Nieves Bolaños very kindly introduced me last month as NELA’s new Vice President of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I am also a co-chair of NELA’s Ethics and Sanctions Committee and Colorado Bar’s ethics committee. The rules of professional conduct and other legal and social norms purport to define “professionalism.” Smarter people than me, like Leah Goodridge and Shannon Cumberbatch, have explored how concepts of professionalism are shaped by and perpetuate racism and other oppressive ideologies.
 
You should read their essays:
 
Leah Goodridge, Professionalism as a Racial Construct, UCLA Law Review (Mar. 29, 2022): https://www.uclalawreview.org/professionalism-as-a-racial-construct/
 
Shannon Cumberbatch, When Your Identity Is Inherently “Unprofessional”: Navigating Rules of Professional Appearance Rooted in Cisheteronormative Whiteness as Black Women and Gender Non-Conforming Professionals, 34 J.C.R. & Econ. Dev. 81 (2021): https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1904&context=jcred
 
Leah Goodridge notes that “The basis of professionalism as a racial construct is the belief that the racial hierarchy which produces the phenomenon will remain the same and that practitioners will adapt to it rather than challenge it.” And she asks that we discuss, in our workplaces and in NELA and other organizations, “How does professionalism as a racial construct manifest at this institution?” This question will be a focus
… Read More

Diversity on the Bench: “It All Matters”

As you can read on our website page, diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values of the National Employment Lawyers Association. Those values are essential to the achievement of NELA’s mission, which includes empowering workers’ rights attorneys by promoting a fair judiciary. In other words, NELA is committed to the principle that the playing field for its members, and their clients, is “level” only if the group of people who have the authority to decide on the merits of their claims – the judiciary – is, taken as a whole, “fair.”

And to be “fair,” the judiciary must reflect the diversity of the population of citizens that it serves. The Brennan Center for Justice put it aptly in an article titled, What Research Shows About the Importance of Supreme Court Diversity: “Ensuring demographic and experiential diversity on the bench is not just an appropriate component of judicial selection, it is necessary.” As the article points out, this is true for a number of reasons.

First, because the judiciary is a vital public institution, it is critical for it to have the trust and confidence of the public that it serves, and “a diverse judiciary helps instill trust in the … Read More

Women’s History Month

March is Women’s History Month. Yet this March, for the first time in 50 years, those who are pregnant, in many parts of this country, have been stripped of their Constitutionally protected right to make the personal health decision to have an abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty does not extend to having an abortion. Further, while those who may become pregnant are overwhelmingly women, the Court further concluded that a ban on abortion does not implicate the Equal Protection Clause. In reaching these conclusions, the Supreme Court used a primarily white, male gaze for its interpretation of what rights are “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition.”

 Sadly, the Court is correct that this country’s history and traditions have not protected the liberty or equality of marginalized people. Infamous decisions such as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), The Civil Rights Cases (1883), and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) all enshrined an apartheid system that resulted in violence and economic subjugation of primarily Black people, while decisions like Minor v. Happersett (1875) ensured that women would not be allowed to participate in the political process until … Read More

Gender Pronouns and Other Gendered Terms

November’s DEI spotlight focused on the harm we can unthinkingly cause with ableist language and some suggestions on more inclusive alternatives we can add to our vocabularies. Another area in which old habits are similarly hard to break, and where it’s easy to underestimate the harm we can unintentionally cause others, is in our use of gender pronouns and other gendered terms.

One way to surface how ubiquitous gendered language is in everyday speech and writing is to monitor your own speech or the speech of those you’re talking to for just five minutes and count the number of gender pronouns, or other gendered terms like “guys,” “sir,” and “ma’am” that crop up. (You can practice the same exercise by counting the number of gendered terms and pronouns in an email or other paragraph of written text.) Now pause at each of these occurrences to recognize that an assumption is being made—either an assumption that gender is binary and that everyone is either a “he” or a “she,” a “man” or a “woman”; or an assumption that knowing a person’s name or what they look like enables us to determine what gender they identify with, if any. That’s an awful … Read More

Do You Unknowingly Use Ableist Language?

NELA recently adopted a new Acceptable Use Policy governing the use of the NELA Exchange resources, like the Open Forum. One goal in adopting that new policy was to foster a more inclusive and welcoming environment on The NELA Exchange. Part of the new policy prohibits the use of slurs or epithets in posts, including in quotations and attachments. Members can share resources and cases quoting slurs and epithets off the Open Forum via direct emails. But because reading and hearing those slurs upsets, harms, and offends people, NELA chose to prohibit using those slurs and epithets on The Exchange.
 
Many of those slurs and epithets are obvious, some call them by their first letters. Those words can be shocking to hear. The community agrees that several words are slurs and epithets that should not be used. We recognize or feel the harm those words can cause and do not use them. 
 
But other words that hurt people lurk in the open. Many of us use them frequently. Pejorative terms for disabilities, particularly related to mental health, come up almost daily on the Open Forum, often negatively to express disagreement with opposing counsel’s position or a judge’s ruling.
… Read More

A Fair Judiciary Includes All Court Personnel, Law Clerks Included

As the end of summer is bringing new classes of law clerks to federal judicial chambers across the country, NELA’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Committee is looking with renewed focus to the processes by which these much-sought-after positions are awarded. In particular, the Committee has been monitoring the case of Crystal Clanton, current clerk to Judge Corey Maze (N.D. Ala.) and soon-to-be clerk to Judge William Pryor (11th Circuit). As was reported in a 2017 New Yorker article, Ms. Clanton purportedly sent a colleague a text saying, “I hate Black people,” among other allegedly racist comments, while working as the conservative student group Turning Point USA’s national field director. Ms. Clanton has stated she does not recall making the statements.

The U.S. Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability has re-opened an inquiry into the judges’ respective hiring of Ms. Clanton, after the 2nd Circuit Judicial Council decided in January of this year to uphold the decision of Chief 2nd Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston that there was insufficient evidence of misconduct in Ms. Clanton’s hiring by either judge. The continued concerns surrounding Ms. Clanton’s hiring stem in large part from the fact that no transparent policies … Read More