Policy & Positions

WASHINGTON, August 16, 2021 – The American Bar Association is deeply saddened and concerned about the demise of the rule of law in Afghanistan as the Taliban takes control of the Afghan government and society.

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2021 – The American Bar Association respects the decision of the Minneapolis jury in the trial of Derek Chauvin while emphasizing that a single verdict is neither an indictment of all law enforcement nor a solution to the system

WASHINGTON, May 29, 2020 – The American Bar Association is troubled and saddened by events in Minneapolis and other places that underscore the violence against people of color - including police brutality— that still plagues our country despite the great strides our nation has made in recent decades to advance justice and civil rights.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9, 2019 – The American Bar Association joins the world Tuesday in recognizing International Human Rights Day. The day provides an opportunity to commemorate – and renew our commitment to – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

WASHINGTON, July 8, 2016 – The American Bar Association is deeply troubled by the events of the past few days. The incidents are at the same time heartbreaking, infuriating and terrifying. Our civil society and the safety of all in it – citizens and law enforcement – rely on the rule of law.

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2016 -- The American Bar Association welcomes the Department of Justice’s decision to implement mandatory, department-wide implicit bias training for all law enforcement agents and prosecutors.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 1, 2015 -- The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act unveiled today is a landmark step forward that represents the most significant criminal justice reform in decades.

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2014 — As we observe the anniversary of our nation's independence this week, the American Bar Association also celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, this landmark legislation extended the protections of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights specifically to African Americans but also to others.

WASHINGTON, April 13, 2020 — The American Bar Association, in conjunction with the Law School Admission Counsel, Microsoft and Coffee + Dunn, today announced the launch of a new platform that enables organizations participating in the ABA Model Diversity Survey to easily and efficiently obtain the information provided by their law firms that complete the survey. Companies can electronically request, access and review their outside law firm’s diversity data in real time. Law firms, in turn, can submit their data online in an efficient and streamlined process.

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 19, 2019 — The American Bar Association will join with nonprofit Arnold Ventures as a partner in a new grant-funded community effort dedicated to reducing unjust and unnecessary pretrial detention.

CHICAGO, Jan. 29, 2019 — The American Bar Association filed an amicus brief Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that the Calhoun, Ga., bail system, which ties pretrial release directly to a fixed-payment schedule of offenses, violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the 14th Amendment.

WASHINGTON, June 22, 2016 — The American Bar Association Section of Criminal Justice released “The State of Criminal Justice 2016,” which each year examines major issues, trends and significant changes in the U.S. criminal justice system.

CHICAGO, July 31, 2014 -The American Bar Association today announced the release of a report that provides a new empirical method for public defender systems to document how excessive caseloads deny indigent criminal defendants the constitutional right to effective counsel. Focusing on the Missouri public defender system, the report shows that public defenders across the state have insufficient time to devote to all aspects of their cases -from client communication to discovery, investigation and case preparation.

Kimberly Norwood, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, remembers getting her hair straightened as a child. Using sound effects to describe the hot metal comb gliding through her strands, she called the process debilitating because children often couldn’t play outside afterward, fearing that humidity, sweat or water would revert their hair to an afro or natural curl pattern.

“I’ve had a front-row view of injustice for most of my life,” said Mimi Marziani at “Celebrating Democracy: 150 Years of Voting Rights,” held Feb. 14 at the American Bar Association Midyear Meeting in Austin, Texas.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a relatively new term for a problem that has been plaguing America for years. It describes failures in the education system where certain groups of students—students of color, with disabilities, or LGBTQ — are disproportionately disciplined more harshly, including referral to law enforcement for minimal misbehavior; achieve at lower levels; and eventually drop or are pushed out of school, often into juvenile justice facilities and prison.

he American Bar Association Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession awarded five recipients its 2020 Spirit of Excellence Award during a luncheon on Feb. 15 at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Austin, Texas.

Last summer, the Utah Supreme Court took what many consider a revolutionary step in regulatory legal change. The court unanimously approved a working group report that lays out recommendations for narrowing the access to justice gap by reimagining lawyer regulation.

“I’m not a lawyer, but I know a little something about the law,” said civil rights icon John Lewis as he accepted the Thurgood Marshall Award from the ABA Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice on Saturday, Aug. 10, at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

What can the courts and counsel can do to stop the school-to-prison pipeline, in which a disproportionately large number of U.S. young people of color are funneled out of public schools and into the criminal justice system?

The modern legacy of the long struggle to obtain the right to vote for all female U.S. citizens was the subject of a panel discussion on Aug. 9 at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco, touching on the restoration of the right to vote for felons who have served their time, the debate over voter suppression versus voter fraud and the hostility facing women electoral candidates.

Working as a sexual assault prosecutor in the 1990s, Nancy E. O’Malley recalled the case of a 12-year-old raped by a 50-year-old man in a motel room and sold by a 39-year-old man. When the girl explained what her life was like, O’Malley realized “we as a community, we as professionals, we in the legal community and we in the advocate community all have a role to play” in helping to prevent human trafficking. Since then, she said, “We have come a very long way,” although “there is still so much further to go.”

For five years beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime in Germany systematically purged Jewish lawyers and jurists from the legal profession. For the most part, non-Jewish lawyers there remained silent as more than 4,000 of their Jewish colleagues lost their livelihoods.

California attorney John Lim, who immigrated to the United States with his parents from South Korea in 1967, was presented with the 2019 Spirit of Excellence Award by the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession for his commitment to diversity during a ceremony on Jan. 26 at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Las Vegas.

In the era of the “app,” digital legal tools offer encouraging signs to narrow a justice gap that has plagued the United States in recent years, leaving nearly 9 out of 10 low-income Americans without services for civil legal needs.

On Jan. 29, six days before the New England Patriots take on the Los Angeles Rams at the Superbowl in Atlanta, the city will be the site of the ATL End Human Trafficking Summit, a citywide effort to help end human trafficking.

With the American Bar Association hosting its Midyear Meeting in Las Vegas, the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty held a Jan. 25 program to address the problem of homelessness among youth in Southern Nevada.

The contact sport of football would appear to have little in common with the legal field of dispute resolution, where parties try to negotiate results rather than run over each other.

The American Bar Association presented awards to three individual lawyers and two law firms for demonstrating outstanding commitment to volunteer legal services for the poor and disadvantaged at its Annual Meeting in August in San Francisco.

“Laws keep changing, but you can’t legislate change in people’s hearts and minds,” said Ainka Jackson, executive director of the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation and member of the ABA Commission on Homelessness and Poverty. Jackson was referring to her journey on the commission and pursuing its mission in underserved communities during her presentation as part of “10 Ways to Change the World,” sponsored by the newly formed ABA Center for Public Interest Law, held Jan. 25 at the Midyear Meeting in Las Vegas.

By now you have heard of implicit bias, explicit bias, racial bias, gender bias and how the unconscious forming of attitudes and stereotypes affects our understanding about and actions related to members of a social group ¬-- from the courtroom, to the boardroom and to our everyday walk.

The controversy over Confederate monuments gained greater national prominence following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, when white nationalists protested the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, resulting in a violent clash between opposing parties.

In honor of the 10th anniversary of the National Celebration of Pro Bono, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan sat down with American Bar Association President Bob Carlson at Georgetown University Law Center on Oct. 24 to discuss pro bono service, how her prior experience serves her as a justice, whether or not the Supreme Court is politicized and more.

“If you were to fill Petco Park [the 42,445-seat baseball park in San Diego] to capacity with low-income people, there would be just two lawyers to serve them all.” That was the stark image summoned by Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California Goodwin Liu, the keynote speaker at the National Meeting of State Access to Justice Commission Chairs, held in conjunction with the ABA Equal Justice Conference in San Diego in May.