(Photo via Yale Law School)
After the Yale Law Journal editorial board announced its incoming class of 60 new student editors and managed to only find four black or Latinx students to invite, we’ve been waiting with bated breath for the journal — or the school for that matter — to say anything to their increasingly diverse student body about how something like this could happen.
Yesterday afternoon, we finally heard the Yale Law Journal’s side of it, and it’s not great. YLJ’s editorial board responded with a statement posted to the Yale “Wall.” The statement begins by reaffirming YLJ’s commitment to diversity and detailing some of the initiatives that past YLJ leadership teams have undertaken. Then the current management team outlines the specific initiatives they pursued and that… only raises more questions:
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Before the admissions process began, the members of the Board most directly involved in admissions… reached out to the leadership of every Alliance for Diversity affiliated group to set up individual meetings where we discussed our shared concerns and goals for Journal admissions and beyond. Throughout the admissions process, our Diversity & Membership Editor provided tailored support to the affinity groups that conduct their own trainings for the three components of our admissions process (the Bluebook exam, the critical essay, and the diversity statement), as well as to those that did not conduct their own trainings.
Swing and a miss. “[T]he three components of our admissions process (the Bluebook exam, the critical essay, and the diversity statement).” What? There’s a diversity statement. And they still only found four people? FOUR!
This also addresses some of the more reactionary emails I’ve received in response to the initial post. Mostly superficial, entirely uninformed blathering about the “blind” grading system that journals use to select student editors. And while unconscious bias is real and can arise in response to any number of prompts from rhetorical choices to the subject matter selected for critical essays, we don’t even have to get into those weeds because they actually ask for a diversity statement.
So now we have to ask, exactly how were these diversity statements handled? Did they just put a check mark next to anyone who claimed to be diverse and count those up? Because it stops being “diverse” if only one traditionally discriminated against group gets the benefit. Admissions and human resources personnel are trained in these concepts — law students aren’t. Probably a good reason why student-run journals should have stronger collaborative relationships with experienced professionals in this field. At the very least, it’s probably time to reassess the role of these statements to the overall mission.
In any event, the full statement from the YLJ board reads as a group of students who want you to know they tried their best. Unfortunately, it kind of proves they didn’t understand the assignment.
(Read the full response from YLJ’s editorial board on the next page.)
Earlier: Yale Law School Grows Increasingly Diverse, Yale Law Journal Takes A Different Path
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.