Aaron Sibarium

The city of Seattle is facing legal threats over a community gardening program that prioritizes minorities for plots of land and forces applicants to sign an "anti-racism statement," provisions that a conservative legal group says are unlawful.

When Maya Parthasarathy, a student editor at the California Law Review, applied for the journal's admissions committee in 2025, she knew exactly what her colleagues wanted to hear.

In October 2023, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) held a meeting with some of the top law firms in the United States. For years, the nonprofit had operated a diversity fellowship that placed "underrepresented" law students at white-shoe firms the summer before their 1L year. With law firms abandoning similar programs in the wake of the Supreme Court's ban on affirmative action in college admissions, SEO wanted to assure its partners that they could still participate in the fellowship without fear of legal action.

At least 17 law firms have dropped out of a prestigious internship program that allegedly excluded white applicants, cutting the program's enrollment in half as it faces a federal probe.

The dean of Penn State Dickinson Law resigned on Friday after a former student testified before Congress about the school’s mandatory anti-racism class, which required all first-year students to "acknowledge the reality of systemic racism."

The Broadway musical Wicked was hit with a lawsuit last week alleging that the production discriminated against white men, the second time this year that racial preferences have been challenged in the theater world.

Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes the majority of Portland, plans to spend nearly $300 million on explicitly race-conscious programs over the next year, documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show, including a program that aims to house minority veterans "at rates equal to or greater than their white peers."

David Blackman, a native of Plano, Texas, was thrilled to be starting law school at Penn State in the fall of 2025. A former 911 call operator and a veteran of the Texas State Guard, Blackman, 26, loved the university's football team and its location in the Appalachian Mountains. "I’ve been a fan of Penn State since I was a teenager," Blackman told the Washington Free Beacon. He arrived on campus in August 2025, a 50 percent merit scholarship in hand, excited for game nights in Beaver Stadium and a three-year reprieve from the Texas heat. Then he sat through his first anti-racism class.

In an internal planning document distributed to faculty last month, Pennsylvania's flagship law school promised to devote the entire institution to "antiracism," from recruitment and hiring decisions to research and classroom instruction. Penn State Dickinson Law said it would "recruit, retain, teach and research according to antiracist principles" and embrace an "antiracist critical pedagogy," according to a copy of the document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The homelessness crisis in Multnomah County, Oregon, is among the worst in the country. Home to deep-blue Portland, where the deaths of homeless people quadrupled between 2019 and 2023, according to data from the county health department, Multnomah has a per-capita homeless rate of 1.3 percent, and some shelters are closing due to budget problems.