BRIAN LEITER IS CORRECT: It’s a good thing the President of the AALS doesn’t really matter to legal education.

I’ll just note, as an aside, that the idea at the conclusion of Dean Dickerson’s letter that law schools should be “transformed” into “anti-racist institutions” [as distinct from being non-racist ones that comply with equal opportunity laws] would portend a massive violation of the academic freedom of all faculty (for example)– just as transforming law schools into “anti-communist” or “anti-capitalist” institutions would. Law schools exist to train lawyers and produce knowledge about the law, not to promote extraneous social goals, even meritorious ones.

The nice thing about taking on fuzzy missions like “anti-racism” is that there’s no danger of being assessed according to concrete metrics.