Abstract

Excerpted From: Emile Loza de Siles, ¡We Count! The Enumerated History of the Latinx Legal Academy: Part One, Beginnings to 1990, 23 Seattle Journal for Social Justice 595 (Spring, 2025) (392 Footnotes) (Full Document Requested)

In other lawless, cruel, and disruptive times, Latinx people united in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, El Movimiento, a thirty-year sustained collective action and political movement started in the 1940s to advance equality and the respect for the human and civil rights of their communities. Leaders first brought El Movimiento to legal education and the academy in the 1970s. They breathed its unapologetic activism, long a necessary tool of Latinx visibility and justice-getting, into their demands for access, equal opportunity, and fair representation in legal education. Counting Latinx law professors was an important part of that activism. The argument went, and still goes, that, if minoritized law students see, learn from, and interact with professors from their communities, those students will be more successful in their law school and subsequent legal careers. If they see people from their community in positions of power and expertise, so too will they see their future selves. See it to be it.

Counting? Counting might be dismissed as a simple and monumentally mundane task. It is neither simple nor mundane. Counting and documenting historical accountings, with all the underlying sleuthing, discovery, and conundra-solving, is difficult and deeply complex. It is also of pivotal importance. Counting becomes a radical act. Counting and reclaiming its history make a significant contribution of critical scholarship. Counting becomes protest, a cry out and a demand for reckoning, another in the rage against the systemic injustices, invisibility, and disappearances visited upon la gente.

This Article constitutes the first in a new series of scholarly articles presenting and commenting upon extensive empirical and archival research of the Latinx legal academy in the United States, including Puerto Rico. This Article presents the enumerated history of Latinx law professors, beginning with the firsts and following the history of their struggle to count from the beginning to 1990.

The ¡We Count! series, a three-part history desde el comienzo hasta hoy, is the first to comprehensively document the growth and development of the Latinx legal academy in the United States, despite systemic racist and other inequitable exclusionary barriers. It is the first to count us and synthesize and analyze those accountings across that long-hidden and forgotten history. The archival and empirical work contributes a thoroughly researched and reliable factual record from which to springboard other critical scholarship, scholarship-as-service, and scholarship-as-activism.

This Article follows a chronological organization, interweaving observations, analyses, and critiques along the way. In Part I, the Article starts by identifying the first Latinx law professors in the country, starting with Puerto Rico's first such faculty member in 1913. It then frames the historical accountings of the Latinx legal academy along the dimensions necessary to understand, analyze, and compare the data: date, institution, Latinidad, territory, and others. The Article then introduces and discusses two equality and justice metrics at which community and institutional accountings of the Latinx legal academy were aimed: population parity and student parity.

Parts II and III are decennial, focusing on the 1970s and the 1980s, respectively. Part II marks another first: the first known cluster hire of Latinx law professors in the continental United States, that at the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1972. Among that group was Professor Cruz Reynoso, and he, along with law students and other faculty members, brought El Movimiento to the legal academy. Supporting that activism with empirics, Professor Reynoso began the enumeration of Latinx law professors.

Following the enactments of civil rights acts in the prior decade, the 1970s marked a turning point for the country toward more equal justice. The legal academy, however, was much slower to change. The academy launched affirmative action programs, and there was some incremental progress toward diversifying law faculties. Latinx law professors remained largely invisible and ignored, however. They constituted only a tiny fraction of law professors in the 1970s, and only the dedicated efforts of Latinx law schools and administrators saved even those tiny facts from oblivion.

Something else happened in the 1970s that would later have significant importance to the Latinx legal academy and its push for greater equality, representation, and justice. Then a higher education researcher, Dr. Michael Olivas saw that racism and other barriers to Latinx access to education resulted in perpetuating injustices and other harms to the country's Latinx population. He tied that lack of access to education to poverty, discrimination, and many other ills impacting Latinx communities. Presenting his formulations in a 1978 conference paper, they became a central organizing theme around which he and others worked to advance Latinx legal education and the Latinx representation on law faculties.

Part III covers the 1980s. National legal organizations began to consider faculty diversity. The American Bar Foundation (ABF) had examined attorney diversity in 1967, but the summer of 1980 marked its first published study of faculty diversity and that with five-year-old data from the 1975-1976 academic year. The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) did the country's first institutional survey of faculty diversity, that for the 1980-1981 academic year, and then redid that survey when it carried out a second survey covering 1986-1987. Data about Latinx law faculty, all of these community-reported, were smattered throughout the intervening years. Then, in the summer of 1985, Associate Justice Cruz Reynoso and Professor Olivas met to discuss the state of the Latinx legal academy. That pivotal meeting represented a passing of the torch by which, through enumeration, activism, and public scholarship, to lift up and grow that important community of law teachers and scholars.

The next year, Professor Olivas focused his incisive arguments upon the legal education system, studying the Latinx law professoriate in the 1986-1987 academic year. In his 1988 article in CHANGE, he presented the empirical evidence and called out law schools' abject failures, and subterfuges attempting to mask those failures, to achieve even the most basic justice metric: population parity for Latinx representation on their faculties. He connected the lack of Latinx access to legal education to an intransigent bar to that community's access to the power and influence that legal education engenders. He recognized that access to power was critical to the Latinx community's justice-getting and its ability to effectuate change and improve its lot. He forcefully argued that Latinx law professors, and their proportional faculty representation, were critically important for Latinx students to access, thrive in, and ultimately wield power through legal education. He called upon law schools to do justice and to open their ranks to more Latinx professors.

Sparked also by earlier efforts by Associate Justice Cruz Reynoso and Sr. Donato Tapia, co-founders with others of the Hispanic National Bar Association's (HNBA's) progenitor, Professor Olivas' work ignited; and the “Dirty Dozen” list, or “The List,” was born. Despite the unavailability of many original records, this Article stitches together and reclaims, for the first time, comprehensive details of The List's genesis, along with its criteria, development, governance, lifespan, and significant impacts.

The HNBA, with Professor Olivas chairing the effort, took the leadership role in advancing the state of la gente on law faculties, releasing the first Dirty Dozen List, which covered the 1989-1990 academic year. At about this time, the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) also at last awoke to the imperative importance of faculty diversity. It appointed its Special Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers in 1987 and produced its first faculty diversity study, which, like the first List, also covered the 1989-1990 academic year.

The Article wraps with concluding remarks to reflect upon the deep and critical relevance of this work and the next two articles forthcoming in the ¡We Count! series. Three appendices follow. Appendix A provides comparative and other data tables derived from the Article's research and narratives. Appendices B and C unravel the complex organizational iterations, names, and name usage history of today's HNBA; and the HBNA body(ies) responsible for the Dirty Dozen Lists, respectively. These appendices facilitate the understanding of and further scholarship regarding the HNBA's then-prominent role in counting Latinx law professors and in holding law schools accountable for their resistance to Latinx law scholars and teachers on their faculties.

By enumerating our history, this work declares that we count. It declares that our Latinx law students, attorneys, law professors, and judges count. It declares that our communities count. Especially today in the face of hateful ravings, mass deportations, and racist persecutions, it demands that the legal academy, the law, and, ultimately, justice must be held accountable to the Latinx and other minoritized communities and to the nation's increasingly Latinx future.

[. . .]

[. . .]

The three-part ¡We Count! series captures and synthesizes, for the first time, the enumerated history of the Latinx legal academy in the United States. The justice work here pauses, rather than concludes. This first Article presents that history from its genesis to 1990 and describes the analytical framing for those enumerations. It also sets out in a single source the important historical foundations for the next two works in the series. The second article will document this history of la gente through the hopeful days of the Dirty Dozen lists when public exposure led to gains and then on through the dark 2000s when the Latinx and other minoritized legal academics were disappeared from institutional accountings and accountability. The third article in the ¡We Count! series will cover the 2010s with voices and efforts lifted to reclaim place and visibility and then on into the present day when institutional reawakenings sparked hopes, but regime change and industrialized ethnic erasure now dash them.

The numbers are important in their own right as historical fact. They also serve a higher purpose. They defy erasure. They reveal as pretext claims of meaningful efforts toward measurable justice and representativeness for Latinx and other minoritized faculty members in the legal academy.

At bottom, the principal focus of this work and of the ¡We Count! series has to do with power. It asks: Who has a tight-fisted hold on legal education and power in the law? Who grips the power to influence and, ultimately, determine the law and the extent to which it achieves its principal aims of order, liberty, and justice? Who has that power, and who does not, but lays just claim to it? We all know the answers. The numbers make that clear.

We, the Latinx and other minoritized peoples, claim by right, merit, capacity, endurance, profound grace, and damned hard work to access, hold, and share that power. We count! It is long decades past time to count us in and to stop, at last, counting us out.