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Written by: Barbara Lauren
Published: 01/11/2005 Racial Preferences – Helping or Hurting Black Students?
A new study by a law professor contends that racial preferences in law student admissions hurt black students by getting them admitted to law schools where they are more likely to struggle, to drop out, or to graduate but fail their states’ bar exams.
The study is by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sanders’ presentation met with an overflow crowd at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, held last week in Seattle.
Reaction to the presentation was mixed, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. “One listener thanked Mr. Sander for ‘having the guts to get up here and bring these discussions out in the open,’” the Chronicle reported. “Some who came to the presentation irate about the controversial study found it hard to direct vitriol at the soft-spoken Mr. Sander, a self-described liberal with a biracial son and a history of working on fair housing and other issues.”
Sanders’ study was originally published last November in the Stanford Law Review under the title “A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools.” The Stanford Law Review plans to publish rebuttals in May 2005.
Sanders’ main source of data was the last comprehensive study of bar-passage rates, which was conducted between 1991 and 1997 by the Law School Admission Council. Sanders also drew data from his own study of students who entered 20 law schools in 1995.
His analysis focused only on black students; he is working on another study that includes other underrepresented minority groups.
A different study, by David L. Chambers and Richard O. Lempert, both of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, found that minority students who graduated from Michigan’s law school between 1970 and 1996 were just as successful in their careers as their white peers, even though they started with significantly lower law-school grades and standardized test scores. That study was cited by the Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger, the case in which the Court upheld racial preferences at Michigan’s law school.
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