Should Barristers Adopt a Positive Duty to Promote Equality, Diversity and Inclusion?

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Monday 4th November 2024

The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has launched a public consultation on new rules to promote equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at the Bar. If adopted, barristers would be obliged to ‘act in a way that advances equality, diversity, and inclusion’ when providing legal services and the BSB would assume what it describes as an ‘outcomes focused’ approach to equality. The Free Speech Union hosted a panel of eminent legal experts to grapple with the merits of the Bar Standards Board's proposals. While ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ appear to be concepts worthy of general support, there is still much to debate about what they mean and whether ‘EDI’ is an appropriate framework for the governance of institutions and professions. Concerned barristers discuss the consequences of changing the core duty that they ‘should not unlawfully discriminate’ to a positive duty to advance a set of values that are highly contested. When similar EDI initiatives have been considered elsewhere, they have been challenged on the grounds that they risk introducing compelled speech and thought.

 

SPEAKERS:

Lord Ken Macdonald KC

Former Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald is one of the country’s leading criminal, regulatory and international lawyers. In 2007 he was knighted for services to the law and in 2010 appointed to the House of Lords, where he sits as a crossbencher. He was a Visiting Professor of Law at the London School of Economics from 2009-2012 and he has been a member of the University of Oxford Law Faculty since 2012. He is Chair of the Orwell Foundation, President of the Howard League for Penal Reform and was Warden of Wadham College Oxford from 2012 to 2021.

Poornima Karunacadacharan

Poornima Karunacadacharan is the Policy Manager for Equality and Access to Justice at the BSB. She has been leading on the drafting of the Equality Rules, as well as ensuring equality, diversity, and inclusion is embedded in all areas of BSB regulation. She has over 20 years of experience working in the charity sector and as a consultant for public sector organisations on equality and human rights issues. Poornima has expertise in training public, private, and voluntary sector organisations on the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty.

Akua Reindorf KC

Akua Reindorf KC is a barrister at Cloisters Chambers specialising in employment, discrimination and human rights law. She is instructed in high-profile trials and investigations involving polarising and contested identity and equality issues, serious harassment, and freedom of speech and belief. She is the author of the ‘Reindorf Report’, an investigation into the alleged no-platforming of two gender-critical external speakers by the University of Essex. She has particular expertise in the higher-education sector and works at the interface between university governance and regulation, duties in equality law, public-sector duties, academic freedom and fundamental rights. Akua was the Legal Business Awards Barrister of the Year in 2023 and the Chambers UK Bar Awards Employment Junior of the Year in 2022. She is a visiting senior fellow at LSE Law School, where she focuses on the law of academic freedom and freedom of speech. She is a commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and a fee-paid employment judge.

Lisa D.S. Bildy,

JD, BA Lisa Bildy graduated from Western Law School in 1993. In 2017 she launched a campaign to challenge the Law Society of Ontario's compelled Statement of Principles, believing it was not for a regulator to dictate lawyers’ personal principles. Known as StopSOP, the campaign succeeded in getting elected to the Law Society a slate of lawyers who were committed to repealing this new requirement. She then worked at the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms as a staff lawyer, beginning in 2019, before striking out on her own in the fall of 2021 to further the cause of defending civil liberties and individual freedoms in Canad