Compliance & Diversity

All of the Supreme Court speculation circulating this week took my mind to places that I suppose are pretty atypical.  When I was a law student, I really wanted to clerk, but the University of Chicago had guidelines requiring each student to limit their clerkship applications to fifty judges or less.  As a result, I poured over my list of judges meticulously and asked many people advice about who should be on the list.  One of the people who looked at my list said quite bluntly – “Most black clerks are hired by black judges; keep all of the black, appellate court judges on your list.”  So I basically did.  As it turns out, I had two judges (a white woman and a black man) call me for interviews, and I did ultimately clerk for a judge who is amazing, kind, smart, organized, generous, and also black.  When I went for the circuit-wide clerkship training, I did note that the only two black people in attendance were one of my co-clerks and me.  And a black classmate emailed me shortly after his circuit-wide clerkship training to comment on the fact that he was the only black clerk in attendance. 

Thus, while all the interests groups are lining up to make their pitches about what the important qualities are in a Supreme Court Justice, my mind has turned to the fact that the small number of black appellate court clerks leads to a paucity of black, Supreme Court clerks (how many black, appellate feeder judges are there?), which narrows the field of those persons of color who might one day be on one of these lists.  Clearly, I digress and in doing so have skipped some pertinent intellectual and factual steps in the interest of writing a short-ish post.

My digression, nonetheless, has some relevance in that it may help to connect my interest in diversity to my interest in compliance.  I think sometimes people read my work and feel like the articles I have written on diversity in the profession are unrelated to my compliance work.  They are not.  Individuals attempting to create diverse organizational cultures and those attempting to create compliant organizational cultures and those attempting to create ethical organizational cultures are all addressing the same basic question. One could state the question in a few ways, but here is one:  How does one create a culture that promotes a particular set of values—diversity, compliance, ethics—and actually get buy-in of the organizational members in an effort to achieve the culture one has set out to create?  The question has no easy or simple answer.  Instead, the question requires step by step consideration of the external and internal forces that contribute to the creation of organizational cultures.  When one considers the questions as related, it opens up a number of scholarly approaches.  For instance, in a forthcoming article discussing antidiscrimination efforts within the bar, I rely on literature about the damaging effects created when an employee feels like s/he must remain silent.  I could just as easily use that same literature when talking about sexual harassment at Fox News or internal whistleblowers at Wells Fargo. 

There are certainly very good reasons to think about diversity, compliance, and ethics on their own, but there are upsides to approaching the concepts as if they are one, although perhaps not in the same law review article.  Happy weekend!