Temple Law School was founded for the purpose of expanding access to the legal profession by offering an exceptional legal education to a diverse student body, a commitment that continues to form a central part of our identity today. This commitment to diversity, which encompasses many axes of identity, background, and experience, also informs our work toward equity, inclusion, and belonging – necessary components of any just, ethical, and sustainable community.
These principles –diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging – are goals toward which we strive, as well as values by which we operate. They animate our mission, shaping how we understand it and driving everything we do to pursue it. Together, they enlarge our perspectives as lawyers, scholars, and citizens, and by shaping how we learn, teach, and practice law, they enable us to offer a richer understanding of its promise and limitations to the legal profession itself.
These principles are ultimately about how we build and sustain a community of people who both celebrate difference and work toward a common purpose. To that end, over the past several years we have created opportunities for students and faculty to connect outside the classroom for mentorship and community, emphasized empathy and respect as core professional values, and worked to foster a culture of belonging. We have made changes to our orientation and classroom practices to be more inclusive, and have worked to make our facilities more accessible to people with physical disabilities. While this work is never complete, we are proud of the community we are building together.
Commitment to community is one of Temple Law’s most cherished traditions, affirmed and reaffirmed by the care with which our faculty, staff, and students have worked to make us more welcoming, inclusive, and accessible. We are at our best as a community when each individual is able to both contribute and benefit as their full, authentic self. We are at our best as an institution when we work to create more justice, more equity, and more equality in law and fact. Our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Temple Law School is made in service to these ends, because we believe it is our best hope for achieving them together.