Opportunities for black lawyers have increased, while law firms have sometimes used the diversity of their litgators in questionable and possibly unethical ways, Harvard School of Law professor David Wilkins said yesterday in the African-American Studies Center.
Wilkins, whose lecture was entitled ‘The Black Bar: Black Corporate Lawyers and the Dual Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education,’ said firms put minority lawyers in the courtroom for cases involving minority plaintiffs or juries, even if those lawyers did not do very much work on a particular case.
A law firm defending Bell South Telephone company against a discrimination claim put a black lawyer, who was also a nephew of the presiding judge, on a case, according to Wilkins. The firm’s ulterior motive was to cause the judge, a strong defender of civil rights, to remove himself from the case for being biased toward his nephew.
Increased competition among law firms has led law firms to use such questionable tactics. In such cases, the minority lawyers have been used as an antidote to civil rights claims. Wilkins said it was difficult for defendants to accuse the company of discrimination when they had black lawyers defending them.
Wilkins also talked about changes in the structure of law firms, especially corporate law firms. In 1967, the largest United States law firm employed 125 lawyers, compared to 2003, when one firm employs almost 1,500, he said.
African-Americans have become more present in the profession as the values of the legal establishment have begun to change. Wilkinds said the 1950s Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decisions stopped the ‘separate but equal’ policies.
He said during segregation, and for a period of time afterward, black lawyers only served black clients or the government.
By the 1970s, blacks began to achieve positions in the top firms along side whites and around the time of Brown v. Board being enacted, there were only 2,000 black lawyers in the entire United States, compared to approximately 40,000 of about 1 million lawyers total in 2003, Wilkins said.
Wilkins said the number of blacks hired by the top firms has increased less dramatically.
The good news, according to Wilkins, is that discrimination does not generally prevent minorities from getting jobs in the legal profession.
Wilkins said the bad news is that racism still influences how hired lawyers interact in corporate firms. Black lawyers were only being assigned to trials such as those that defended corporations against discrimination suits being filed by minorities, or when the jury was comprised mainly of minorities, he said.
Wilkins also described the different sides of racial attitudes in the law world and the importance of networking among black law professionals to counter racist decisions in their firms.
Students in attendance said they were surprised to find out how segregated the profession originally was.
‘I was surprised how few opportunities there were in the past,’ said Tigist Mogus, a College of Arts and Sciences junior who said she is interested in working as a civil liberties lawyer.