ABSTRACT
Equity has become a significant goal of every major institution in the United States. Yet equity is often vaguely defined and comprises multi-faceted goals. The concept of equity, as a foil to treating everyone identically under formal equality, can both foster and undermine an institution’s primary mission or other values. This paper reckons with how institutions, especially legal academia, can balance equity against other institutional values. The proper balancing of equity and other institutional values is impeded by the difficulties defining equity and the chilling effects institutional actors face in discussing these issues.
This paper first traces the concept of equity from its historical roots in Aristotle and the courts of equity, to modern anti-discrimination law, to critical theory scholarship. The paper then defines what I term procedural equity, which is focused on fairness of access and opportunities, and substantive equity, which is focused on fairness of results. These concepts of equity exist in some tension with an institution’s other goals, such as efficiency, freedom of speech and inquiry, and classical liberal individual rights or other moral systems of justice. Critical to performing this balancing is an ability to discuss these issues openly, and institutions, especially academia, are not leaving sufficient spaces open for members to have diverging views on the different conceptions of equity.
Goldberg, Erica, Defining and Balancing Equity (April 21, 2023), Nevada Law Journal, Forthcoming.
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