NEW: Five of America’s top law firms operate diversity programs that exclude white applicants or explicitly favor minorities.

The firms are Wachtell Lipton, Winston & Strawn, Baker McKenzie, Sidley Austin, and Susman Godfrey.🧵

freebeacon.com/courts/meet-th… Morrison & Foerster and Perkins Coie were sued last month over their minority-only fellowships. But these five firms also racial criteria to dispense professional opportunities, meaning that the outcome of the case could reverberate broadly throughout the legal profession.

NEW: The largest hospital system in Georgia, Emory Healthcare, has scrapped Christmas Eve from its paid holiday calendar and added Juneteenth. Employees will now have to use paid time off to celebrate the December holiday.

Why the change? “Equity.” 🧵

freebeacon.com/culture/emory-… The new schedule, announced August 31, will also let employees earn extra holiday pay for working on Juneteenth—but not on Christmas Eve.

NEW: Top law school officials are brainstorming ways to circumvent the affirmative action ban, advising schools not to create a "record" of "discriminatory intent" and warning that socioeconomic preferences will result in too many white and Asian admits.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/law-sch… That advice, dispensed at a conference in July, came from UC Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky and UMichigan general counsel Timothy Lynch. Hosted by the American Association of Law Schools, the event focused on how schools could use race-neutral means to achieve diversity.

We’re at a strange moment where wokeness is moderating and maybe even receding in some key ways—the layoffs of DEI officers, the toxicity of ESG—even as centrist liberalism is effectively radicalizing against democracy ahead of 2024.

Exhibit A: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Read my friend @jawillick on why kicking Trump off the ballot is a really, really bad idea: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…

NEW: The American Bar Association could soon require all law schools to bar "disruptive conduct that hinders free expression,” according to a proposal from the group’s accreditation arm.

The proposal explicitly references the Stanford shoutdown.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/america… The draft requirement comes after House Republicans called on the ABA to investigate Stanford in the wake of the protest against Judge Kyle Duncan. Those events were "in the background" of the proposed standard, according to an August 2 memo from the ABA. freebeacon.com/campus/house-r…

It’s incoherent to defend a department or major’s existence (as opposed to an individual scholar’s free speech rights) at a public university without also defending the substantive value of the program.

If you support a gender studies major but not an astrology department, you… https://t.co/ojtjKvQrt8twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1690042995243089921

You can of course think that universities should voluntarily abolish gender studies, but that legislatures should refrain from making curricular decisions. This is a perfectly coherent view that presupposes the relative trustworthiness of professors and administrators as compared… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

NEW: Many European countries support sex changes for minors—with safeguards.

But even that moderate position appears to be verboten at America’s premier child psych organization, which has nixed at least three panels on Europe’s approach to gender care.🧵
freebeacon.com/campus/they-su… The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) rejected one panel in 2022 and two more this May on the advice of its "Gender Identity Committee," whose co-chair, Aron Janssen, has described restrictions on puberty blockers as an "effort to oppress."

Columbia Law School said it would require all applicants to submit "video statements" in the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling—to evaluate students’ “personal strengths,” of course.

They backtracked within hours of me contacting them.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/columbi… "All applicants will be required to submit a short video, no longer than 90 seconds, addressing a question chosen at random," the school’s admissions page said Monday morning. webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache…

NEW: For years, some of the country’s top lawyers have pushed their clients to adopt race-based policies that many experts say are unlawful—and which are now getting their clients in legal trouble.

The lead offender? Eric Holder of Covington & Burling.🧵
freebeacon.com/democrats/star… In 2018, Starbucks retained Covington, one of the top white shoe law firms in Washington, DC., to conduct a series of “civil rights assessments” under Holder’s leadership, after one of coffee maker’s stores mistakenly called the cops on two black men.

NEW: NYU hosted a whites-only "anti-racism" workshop for public school parents in New York City, barring minorities from a five-months-long seminar that legal experts say was a brazen violation of civil rights law.

We have audio and video. 🧵

freebeacon.com/campus/woke-or… The all-white seminar, "From Integration to Anti-Racism," cost $360 to attend and met six times between February and June, according to a description of the program that has since been scrubbed from the university’s website without explanation. web.archive.org/web/2023030601…

NEW: After Stanford Law students shouted down a sitting federal judge, the law school promised a mandatory half-day training session on free speech.

The training turned out to be an online program that required scarcely a minute’s effort.🧵

freebeacon.com/campus/stanfor… Rather than host in-person programming, the law school gave students six weeks to watch five prerecorded videos, most about an hour long, and asked them to sign a form attesting that they had done so.

In 2017, the CFBP said a small mortgage company may have “redlined” African Americans by commenting on urban crime.

When the lenders did consumer testing, not a single black person found their comments offensive.

But in 2020, the CFBP sued them anyway.🧵freebeacon.com/policy/a-small… The CFBP bars lenders from making statements that "discourage" minorities from applying for loans. Townstone Financial may have violated that regulation, the agency said, when its employees discussed crime in Chicago on a company-hosted radio show about the mortgage market.

NEW: From S&P Global to the London Stock Exchange, tobacco companies are crushing Tesla in the ESG ratings. How could cigarettes, which kill over 8 million a year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars?

One answer: Tobacco’s gone woke.🧵freebeacon.com/latest-news/ho… S&P Global gives @elonmusk’s car company an ESG score of 37 out of 100. It gives Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, an ESG score of 84.

Sustainalytics, another ESG rating, gives Tesla a worse score than Altria, one of the largest tobacco producers in the world.

Last May, Princeton fired Joshua Katz, a tenured professor who had criticized the school’s racial politics.

So it took some chutzpah for Princeton’s president, in a commencement address last week, to scold Republicans for suppressing campus speech.🧵

freebeacon.com/columns/politi… Quoting a "queer" University of Florida student, Christopher Eisgruber, in a commencement address that would have fit right in at a Democratic political rally, warned that it is becoming harder for students and professors to speak their minds about controversial issues.

NEW: Seattle’s promotional exams for firefighters now test candidates on Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and “Memoirs of a Transgender Firefighter,” among other woke texts.

The Lieutenant exam tests ~800 pages of material unrelated to firefighting tactics.🧵
freebeacon.com/latest-news/se… When a fire truck approaches a blaze, the lieutenant decides how to tackle it—what windows to breach, which floors to prioritize, and how best to deploy the truck’s three or four firefighters against a shifting. It’s a hard job that requires lots of knowledge about fire behavior.

NEW: DC bar officials say they will "likely" lift the mask requirement for the city’s upcoming bar exam after my story yesterday.

But, judging from emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, they aren’t happy about it.🧵

freebeacon.com/campus/dc-to-l… I sent the DC Court of Appeals, which administers the test, a request for comment yesterday. Upon receiving my inquiry, Marie Robertson, the court’s acting chief deputy clerk, forwarded it to Doug Buchanan, the court’s PR director, with clear instructions: control the narrative.

SCOOP: The DC bar will require all applicants to wear masks when they sit for the city’s 12-hour bar exam in July.

The requirement comes on the heels of a study that found masks can cause "difficulty concentrating” and "reduced cognitive performance.”🧵

freebeacon.com/campus/dc-bar-… “Applicants will be required to wear a mask fully covering their mouth and nose during the exam," the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which administers the test, told registered test-takers in a Thursday memo. freebeacon.com/wp-content/upl…

NEW: All across America, hospitals are facilitating childhood gender transition with virtually zero gatekeeping.

Why? Because otherwise they’ll lose points on the Human Rights Campaign’s Healthcare Equality Index—a scorecard funded by Pfizer and PhRMA.🧵 freebeacon.com/latest-news/ho… Let’s start at Children’s National in DC. It was 2019 when Beth Rempe, then a nurse at the health center, began to notice the change. Doctors were wearing pins with the transgender flag. More patients were on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, especially young girls.

NEW: Stanford's Black Law Students Association will no longer help the university recruit black students after the law school apologized to Judge Kyle Duncan.

The group said the apology “was intimately aligned with White supremacist practices."🧵

freebeacon.com/campus/stanfor… The students cited what they described as the "scapegoating" of the school's diversity dean, Tirien Steinbach, for an incident last month in which students disrupted Duncan's remarks and Steinbach egged them on.

NEW: A Jewish student group at Yale Law School pulled out of an event with a centrist Israeli politician, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, after deciding the talk would be too controversial.🧵freebeacon.com/campus/jewish-… Yale’s Jewish Law Students Association agreed in February to host Cotler-Wunsh for a lecture on anti-Semitism and human rights, one of several planned stops on a speaking tour organized by the Academic Engagement Network, a pro-Israel advocacy group.

NEW: Walmart was long a bogeyman for liberals concerned about the power of big business.

Now the company is using that power to pump DEI into Arkansas public schools, transforming its hometown through grants, nonprofits, and corporate outreach.🧵
freebeacon.com/democrats/how-… In Jan 2020, Walmart approached public school administrators in Bentonville, Arkansas, about hosting diversity training sessions for the district. "We want people to feel welcomed, comfortable, and safe living here,” Candice Jones, Walmart’s head of DEI, emailed district leaders.