¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ

First-year students were assigned as optional summer reading A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki. The book retells American history from the perspective of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and others. Incoming students were asked to reflect on racism’s pattern of thinking and its deployment in the treatment of marginalized groups as the country developed. At 1L Orientation, Former Dean Anaya and Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Excellence Fernando Guzman facilitated a discussion with 1Ls about the book’s themes. Law school staff also met in small discussion groups to discuss the book.

Assistant Dean Guzman is leading training for faculty and staff on implicit bias and microaggressions. Other campus-led trainings are being made available.

Professor Deborah Cantrell created and facilitated the school’s first-ever 1L Anti-Racism and Intersectionality Caucus this fall. Caucus conversations focus on what it means to be an anti-racist and how members of the Colorado Law community can support intersecting aspects of identity, including gender and sexual orientation. The caucus provides an opportunity for students to explore anti-racism and intersectionality more generally by learning about white fragility and white privilege and will apply frames of anti-racism and intersectionality to the law and the legal profession. Participants consider how their own experiences in law school do, or do not, acknowledge systemic racism and injustice, and do, or do not, help support our own efforts to be anti-racist and attentive to intersectionality. Students in the caucus are encouraged to foster other similar caucus conversations amongst their peers. In April 2021, the caucus released its first newsletter to the Colorado Law community.

The fall Faculty Colloquium focused on race and policing, voting rights, and immigration detention, with talks by University of Southern California Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law Jody David Armour, USC Gould School of Law’s Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Professor of Law Franita Tolson, and University of Denver Sturm College of Law Associate Professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández.

This spring, Colorado Law offered a seven-part Inclusive Classroom Seminar Series to equip Colorado Law faculty to engage critically with the issues of race and inequality that are embedded in most courses. The series was created and led by Professor Rabea Benhalim, faculty director of the Anti-Racism and Representation Initiative, in collaboration with ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder’s Center for Teaching & Learning.

The annual faculty retreat, held on Aug. 21, 2020, focused on inclusive pedagogy as a central theme, with breakout sessions following guest speaker , Joseph A. Matson Dean and professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Dean Cole spoke powerfully about his upbringing, transition into the legal academy, and move into the deanship at Notre Dame. He discussed his experience in the classroom and how he selected course materials in a way that foregrounded issues of racism, sexism, and social inequality. Dean Cole engaged the Colorado Law faculty in dialogue about student perceptions, fairness to faculty of color, expected and unexpected challenges facing faculty of color and women in the academy, and ways to create better and more hospitable environments.

The law school’s William A. Wise Law Library developed a webpage with .

An example of a course that was newly revised to include anti-racist pedagogy is Associate Professor Nadav Orian Peer’s course in Financial Institutions, which was redesigned for fall 2020 to focus on the history of financial segregation, its effects on communities of color, tools available for civil rights lawyers working on financial issues, and paths towards reform.

The law school has implemented a voluntary Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Pledge Program. Based upon the structure of the existing highly successful Public Service Pledge, participating students will agree to undertake a minimum of 50 hours of law-related diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism work, activities, or educational opportunities not for credit or compensation during their time at Colorado Law.

An extensive database of teaching resources, compiled by Associate Professor Rabea Benhalim,  will be shared with faculty and staff.

Gifts to the Dean's Fund for Excellence were channeled to provide funding to the Korey Wise Innocence Project to hire a recent graduate as a fellow, to support the American Indian Law Program, and to support the Immigration and Citizenship Law Program.

While providing ongoing support of all the law school’s clinics, the law school filled a gap in continuing funding for the Civil Practice Clinic, which under the direction of Clinical Professor Zach Mountin assists low-income and underrepresented workers in their legal disputes. The clinic is also assisting low-income individuals, many of whom are people of color, facing eviction from their homes as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Appellate Advocacy Practicum was reinstated. Adjunct Professor Matthew Cushing now directs the practicum, which enables students under his guidance to represent parties in civil appeals before the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and the Colorado Court of Appeals. Many of the cases taken up by the practicum are on behalf of low-income clients and/or people of color. Recent cases include matters of excessive force by police and racial profiling.

This fall, the Byron R. White Center for the Study of American Constitutional Law hosted a virtual speaker series exploring topics including police reform, citizenship, protest lawyering, voting rights, racial justice, and critical race theory. Additionally, the law school and the center welcomed Douglas Spencer, an election law scholar and professor at the University of Connecticut, as a distinguished faculty fellow for 2020-21.

The Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment welcomed two Water Fellows this fall. One fellow, Jaime Garcia, is working on the which was recently launched by the Colorado River Water and Tribes Initiative to raise awareness and understanding about the lack of adequate water and sanitation facilities in Native American communities in the Colorado River Basin, and to engage leaders to provide universal access to clean water on the tribal reservations in the basin.

The Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship began a new student series on Diversity in Technology Law and Policy. Each panel will focus on the quest for and inherent challenges to diversity and inclusion in the tech law and policy space, addressing common issues faced by a particular underrepresented community. Topics include race, economic privilege, and accessibility.

In September 2020, Colorado Law launched the Race and the Law lecture series, an interactive virtual series focused on the relationship between race and the law, with the objective of generating thinking about the barriers to and possibilities of the law serving as a vehicle of racial justice. Sessions are open to law school students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the broader community. Each session includes time for small-group discussions to spark ideas for action. The series will run through 2021, and will address such topics as racism’s continued presence in federal law and judicial decision-making, tackling racial bias in the midst of a global pandemic, race and the Constitution, and more.

The law school designated a space for BIPOC students, called the "Solidarity Suite," to be managed by the Council for Racial Justice.

To increase access to students from underrepresented groups and low-income communities, Colorado Law's Mini Law School, an eight-week program for non-lawyers, is partnering with Law School…Yes We Can, the Southern Ute Tribe, pre-law advisors, and high school mock trial teams across the state to offer Mini Law School at significantly reduced registration fees or for free.

Colorado Law has also partnered with the Roaring Fork Pre-Collegiate Program, in which high school juniors from Colorado’s Roaring Fork and Summit school districts spend two weeks on the ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder campus exploring college options for their futures. During their visit to ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder, high school students meet with Colorado Law faculty, staff, and current students, learn about law school, what lawyers do, and the requirements to be admitted to law school.

The law school worked with the Latinx Law Students Association on programming around Hispanic Heritage Month, with the Native American Law Students Association on programming in association with American Indian Heritage Month, and with the Black Law Students Association on programming around Black History Month.

Colorado Law partnered with Boulder law firm Hutchinson Black and Cook, LLC on a series of four free community panel discussions entitled "The Roots of Today’s Racial Exclusion in Boulder County and the Road Ahead." The first three panels will discuss the history of exclusion of Black, Native American, and Hispanic American communities from Boulder County, as well as resistance to exclusion by those groups. The focused on the exclusion of Black residents from the city of Boulder and featured Quintard Taylor, Professor Emeritus of American History, University of Washington, and a specialist in African American history in the American West (moderator); and panelists Penfield Tate, III, an attorney, former Colorado state legislator, and son of Boulder’s only Black mayor; Charles Nilon, professor of environmental science at the University of Missouri and son of ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder’s first tenured Black faculty member; and Polly Bugros McLean, associate professor of media studies at ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ Boulder and author of A Legacy of Missing Pieces: The Voices of Black Women of Boulder County.

The law school’s appointments committee has reviewed methodology for hiring faculty and is working to develop procedures to generate more diverse applicant pools. All committee members have completed implicit bias training.

The Mastermind Group Initiative, a peer-to-peer group of faculty and staff, will be piloted in fall 2021 to promote the career growth and development of participants, enhance a sense of community across the law school, and provide opportunities for participants to learn about each members’ work and identify potential collaborations.

The law school is creating an anti-racist event guide to support event organizers in creating inclusive programming. The guide includes advancing the practice of land acknowledgement of indigenous peoples, offering closed captioning, evaluating lecture topics, being intentional about partnering with businesses owned by people of color, and more, to offer well-rounded, inclusive, and engaging events.

In order to attract the participation of people from diverse backgrounds at events, the law school has launched a monthly events email. The purpose of this email is to increase the law school’s outreach to the Colorado legal community and other community members who do not have a current affiliation with the law school. The law school is contacting specialty and diverse bar associations to encourage members to subscribe to the communication. 

Included in the anti-racist event guide will be recommendations for event organizers in implementing inclusive practices when selecting speakers and panelists. Strategies to make events more diverse and inclusive are to conduct research, refine solicitations for topic proposals, designing inclusive outreach, reducing barriers for submission, and focusing on subject matter. The law school will collect data to evaluate and measure the effectiveness of event organizers’ implementation of the new initiative and recommendations set forth in the anti-racist event guide.  

The Colorado Law Career Development Office (CDO) has redoubled its efforts to be more inclusive when inviting employer and alumni participants to its fall 2020 programming.

The CDO has also reviewed and revised its nondiscrimination policy for employers, including using more current terminology.

The CDO has suggested a number of revisions to the Colorado Pledge to Diversity 1L Summer Clerkship Program, though which legal employers commit to hire students of color and other students from underrepresented backgrounds, that will make the program even more inclusive and welcoming for students’ participation. 

The CDO has established a liaison position with the Center for Legal Inclusiveness.