California Moves To Address Racial Disparities In Attorney Discipline

By Sterling Davies | Special to The OBSERVEROn Nov. 14, the State Bar of California’s trustees approved a proposed rule change to automatically expunge nondisbarment attorney discipline records after eight years. The proposal now goes to the California Supreme Court for review and approval.This change is the product of four years of work, led primarily by the State Bar’s Ad Hoc Commission on the Discipline System. The commission, created in 2020 after racial imbalances found in a 2019 study, has been working towards addressing racial disparities within the attorney discipline system.Another purpose of this change is to address racial disparities detailed in the Farkas Report, the aforementioned 2019 study conducted by the Ad Hoc Commission on the Discipline System and George Farkas, a distinguished professor in UC Irvine’s school of education. The study followed the bar’s admitted attorneys from 1990-2009 and their history through 2018, tracking disciplines imposed, complaints filed, probations, disbarments, and resignations. These patterns were then analyzed to see how different patterns emerged based on race, ethnicity, and gender.“What we know from our own data … is that Black male attorneys were twice as likely to be disciplined as their white male counterparts,” State Bar Executive Director Leah...