We’ve been told for the last two years that DEI is dying. States are banning it. Corporations are scrubbing it from their websites faster than Hunter Biden deletes text messages. The Supreme Court torched affirmative action in college admissions. And yet — somehow — dozens of American law schools are still requiring students to genuflect before the DEI altar just to get a diploma. A watchdog group just pulled the receipts, and it turns out the legal profession’s pipeline is still running through an ideological car wash.

Because nothing says “equal justice under law” like forcing future attorneys to complete coursework in how to feel guilty about being American. Really inspiring stuff. I’m sure the Founders would’ve loved it — right after they finished pledging allegiance to King George.

The report, released this week, found that law schools across the country still embed DEI requirements into their graduation criteria. We’re not talking about one woke outpost in Portland. We’re talking about dozens of accredited institutions — schools that are training the next generation of judges, prosecutors, and legislators. Students at these schools can’t walk across the stage and collect their Juris Doctor unless they’ve demonstrated sufficient commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not competence. Not legal reasoning. Not constitutional literacy. DEI.

Let that sink in for a second. You can ace every exam, dominate moot court, and write a law review article that makes Scalia look like a first-year — but if you haven’t checked the DEI box, you don’t graduate. That’s not legal education. That’s a loyalty test. And we used to mock countries that required ideological pledges before you could enter a profession. Now we’re running one.

The American Bar Association deserves a special mention here, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel — or worse, they’ve been driving the bus. The ABA accredits these law schools. They set the standards. And for years, they’ve been pushing “diversity and inclusion” requirements into their accreditation framework, which gives law schools the green light to turn political ideology into a graduation requirement. When the whole country is moving away from this garbage, the ABA is still clinging to it like a life raft.

Here’s what makes this particularly insidious: these aren’t elective courses. These aren’t optional seminars where students can explore different perspectives on social justice. These are mandatory. Required. Non-negotiable. A student who disagrees with the premise of DEI — who believes, say, that people should be judged on merit rather than immutable characteristics — has two choices: lie or don’t graduate. That’s the “inclusion” they’re selling. Include yourself in our ideology, or we’ll exclude you from the profession.

And we wonder why our legal system is a mess. We wonder why activist judges legislate from the bench. We wonder why prosecutors in blue cities refuse to charge violent criminals but will throw the book at a grandma who wandered into the Capitol building. It starts here. It starts in law school, where they’re not teaching students how to think — they’re teaching students what to think. And then those students become the lawyers, the judges, the district attorneys who enforce their worldview on the rest of us.

The national backlash against DEI has been real and it’s been effective. Corporate America got the message. State legislatures got the message. Even some universities got the message. But law schools? They’re dug in like ticks on a hound dog. Because the people running these institutions aren’t educators — they’re activists with tenure. And they know that if they can control who enters the legal profession and what beliefs those people hold, they can shape the law itself for a generation.

This is exactly the kind of institutional capture we’ve been warning about. It doesn’t matter if you win elections. It doesn’t matter if you pass laws. If the people interpreting and enforcing those laws were trained in ideological boot camps disguised as law schools, you’ve already lost the game. The left figured this out decades ago, and they’ve been playing the long game ever since.

So what do we do about it? First, every state legislature that’s passed anti-DEI laws for public universities needs to make sure those laws cover law schools too — no carve-outs, no loopholes. Second, the ABA’s accreditation standards need to be challenged. If an accrediting body is mandating political ideology as a condition of professional licensure, that’s not accreditation — that’s coercion. And third, we need to support the law schools and legal organizations that are pushing back. They exist. They’re growing. And they need our backing.

Because the alternative is a legal profession where every new lawyer has been pre-screened for ideological compliance before they ever step into a courtroom. And if that doesn’t scare you, you haven’t been paying attention to what these people do when they get power.