Law School Admissions: Not Colorblind, Not Blind-Friendly

Law school admissions, as readers of DISCRIMINATIONS know all too well, is not colorblind, but according to a new lawsuit it is completely blind to the needs of one group, the blind.

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning:

The National Federation of the Blind and a blind law school applicant sued the Law School Admission Council last week, charging that its Web site, essential to those preparing for the Law School Admission Test, is inaccessible to blind people, effectively blocking them from law school. Web sites can be “tagged” so that blind people can use software to navigate and obtain information, but the suit charges that the law school site lacks this necessary tagging.

But hold on a minute. If “diversity” is as essential to legal education as all the law school pooh-bahs claim, maybe blind students should be denied admission because, unable as they are to tell black from white and thus unable to experience “diversity,” they cannot receive an essential component of legal education.

Or, in the alternative, perhaps the National Federation of the Blind should expand its litigation strategy to demand that all law schools require all their students to wear some sort of voice-induced “tag” that would identify them by race and ethnicity, thus allowing blind students to benefit from the “diversity” that would otherwise be denied to them.

Say What? (1)

  1. Joe Heater February 23, 2009 at 9:50 am | | Reply

    John,

    As a regular visitor, I find your posts and links enlightening and informative. However most of the time I leave the page enraged and frightened. Enraged at the pontifications and epithets that come from the academy and the so-called intelligentsia.

    Almost with out exception the ones you point to are inane, anti-intellectual, and fly in the face of common sense, as in this post. Frightened because so much of this “thinking” is accepted as conventional wisdom and the received truth.

    Occasionally there is a ray of sunshine though. In the previous post, Why Do We Need Affirmative Action? Ebonics!. If you, dear reader, haven’t done so, go to the piece and read the comments. It would appear there are at least eleven sane people willing to call BS on Rachel Steindel the “Language Columnist”.

    On a completely different note, today is the 64th Anniversary of the flag rising at Mt. Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima.

    Semper Fi

    Joe Heater

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