Advocates of Diversity Grasp for Ways to Drive Change in Legal Profession

Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog
November 29, 2007

Washington — As advocates of racial diversity in the legal profession discussed strategy at a gathering here today, they seemed better equipped to pressure law firms to diversify than they were to drive change in the nation’s law schools.
The liberal-leaning American Constitution Society had assembled the panel of advocates at the National Press Club in hopes of finding ways to get law schools, law students, and the companies that employ lawyers to work together to help more black and Hispanic people succeed in the legal profession.
But one panel member, John Nussbaumer, associate dean of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, had bad news about law schools’ ability to contribute to the effort. He said that any pressure on law schools to diversify is being counterbalanced by pressures on such schools to take in students with high Law School Admission Test scores, to elevate their rankings in publications such as U.S. News & World Report.
Largely as a result of such ranking pressures, Mr. Nussbaumer said, 63 percent of black applicants to law schools are rejected by every institution to which they apply, leaving them substantially more likely to “never make it in the front door” than white applicants, who score higher on average on the LSAT and have a 35-percent rejection rate. He cited statistics from the American Bar Association showing a recent decline in the black share of the enrollment of the nation’s law schools, from 7.6 percent in the 1995-96 academic year to 6.8 percent in 2006-7.
Panel members were much more optimistic in discussing their efforts to promote diversity in law firms.
Andrew Bruck, a Stanford University law student who is co-president of Building a Better Legal Profession, said his organization — a fledging group of law students devoted to improving working conditions in their field — appears to be making waves by compiling rankings of law firms based on the number of minority and female lawyers they employ and elevate to partner. He said he had heard many students say they had chosen not to work at law firms with poor records in promoting diversity. His group plans in January to distribute its rankings to Fortune 500 companies, in hopes that those companies will put pressure to diversify on the law firms they hire. [To view the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/news/article/3519/advocates-of-diversity-grasp-for-sticks-to-drive-change-in-legal-profession?at ]