Study Finds ‘Lopsided’ Concentration of Socioeconomic Elites at Law Schools

ABA Journal
Posted Oct 5, 2011 6:00 AM CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

The vast majority of American law students come from relatively elite backgrounds, especially at top law schools, according to a study by a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.
More than three quarters of the students at the nation’s top 20 law schools come from the top one-fourth of the socioeconomic population, and well over half of the students at these schools come from the top 10 percent, according to the study by UCLA law professor Richard Sander. Just 2 percent come from the bottom quarter.
“Across the spectrum of law schools, there is a lopsided concentration of law students towards the high end of the socioeconomic spectrum, which becomes more lopsided with the eliteness of the law school," Sander wrote in his study, published the Denver University Law Review (PDF).

Full Story: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/study_finds_lopsided_concentration_of_socioeconomic_elites_at_law_schools/

Legacy of Bias

Inside Higher Ed
September 22, 2010

When college officials talk about the extra help they provide to applicants who are alumni children (and it’s rare to get them to talk about the topic outside of alumni circles), they tend to say a few things: that the preferences are modest, just an extra “tip” for some well-qualified applicants; that alumni children likely would have had a much greater chance than others of being admitted even without the preference; and that such modest boosts are a small price to pay for the spirit of community and philanthropy created by multigenerational ties to a college.
What if none of that is true?
What if the alumni preferences are significant? What if significant numbers of these alumni children wouldn’t have gotten in anyway? And what if -- contrary to conventional wisdom -- alumni preferences have no impact on alumni giving? Those what-ifs are all true, according to a book being published and released today by the Century Foundation (and distributed by the Brookings Institution Press). The book is a collection of research articles by scholars, journalists and lawyers arguing that much of what colleges have said over the years about alumni admissions preferences isn’t true -- and that they amount to the book’s title: Affirmative Action for the Rich.

Full Story: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/22/legacy

Pat Buchanan Continues His Racist Attacks on Sotomayor

AlterNet
By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet.
Posted July 17, 2009.

What opponents of affirmative action like Pat Buchanan fail to grasp is that this country was built on affirmative action -- for white males.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, Pat Buchanan attacked Sonia Sotomayor, specifically, and affirmative action, in general. Included in his attack were such claims as "this has been a country built basically by white folks," that Sotomayor was purely an affirmative-action candidate who lacks real credentials and his suggestion that we need more white, male Supreme Court nominees -- like Robert Bork -- despite the fact that 108 of the 110 Supreme Court justices in our nation's history have been white.
What opponents of affirmative action like Buchanan fail to grasp is that this country was built on affirmative action -- for white males -- and you don't have to go back to the Founding Fathers to see this in action.
If you go back to the 1950s, which Buchanan apparently wants to do, and look at the major private universities, you would find that 20 to 30 percent of the admissions were "legacies" -- people who got there not on merit but because they were the sons of alumni and donors. George W. Bush, of course, is the poster child for this generation of affirmative action babies.
I'd like to see Buchanan, or any conservative, defend Bush's admission to Yale on the basis of merit.

Full Opinion: http://www.alternet.org/rights/141408/pat_buchanan_continues_his_racist_attacks_on_sotomayor/