IDEAL: Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning Environment

Stanford Law School is committed to enhancing its focus on inclusion, diversity, equity, and access to ensure that all members of our community achieve their fullest potential. Effectively addressing issues relating to inclusion, diversity, equity, and access must be a foundation of legal education such that students graduate with competencies to lead, innovate, and solve problems around the world and across our nation.

Stanford Law School is committed to enhancing community, belonging, inclusion, diversity, equity, and access to ensure that all members of our community achieve their fullest potential. This work extends across SLS and the university, as articulated in the strategic plan for Stanford IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Access in a Learning Environment).

The IDEAL Strategic Plan marks the transition of IDEAL from a set of university-sponsored initiatives to an umbrella framework that will support university-wide work contributing to inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. Within this framework, the university will align efforts across multiple schools, units, and departments; scale successful practices; and promote a consistent message of inclusive excellence.

Our Commitment

Our Responsibility

Good lawyers are expert in and practice careful, reasoned discourse and argument; they support their claims with evidence; and they find ways to compromise, collaborate, settle disputes, and solve problems. In a society where colleagues, clients, opposing parties, and other stakeholders come from very different backgrounds and viewpoints, the ability to navigate differences successfully is an indispensable professional skill. Cultivating this is not optional. Stanford should excel in instilling it in future lawyers.

Meeting this charge in today’s world requires creativity, rigor, humility, and accountability. We must set the highest standards for excellence here as in every other area of our mission. Moving forward strategically requires deliberate focus on what we teach and research, who has access to and comprises our learning community, and how we support our students through their journey into the legal profession and prepare them to become exceptional lawyers. We seek to make these changes to ensure SLS is the diverse, inclusive, and equitable institution we need and want it to be.

Our Community Partnership

In concert with efforts to foster greater attention to all these issues, we have created a more dynamic and productive feedback framework. Course evaluations now provide explicit opportunities for students to identify inclusive teaching opportunities and practices. Coupled with other pathways for raising concerns about classroom climate, we expect these efforts will enable our faculty to hone best practices and to create new ones for others to adopt.

For ideas beyond a specific course or class, we will develop more robust avenues through which our community may share feedback and concerns, to propose ideas or make suggestions, and to reinforce our commitment to a more equitable and inclusive future.

These efforts are critical to ensure that all members of our community feel included and are heard, that debate is robust even on topics that are fraught, and that we maintain the highest standards of intellectual rigor.