Law Schools

Classism In Academia

Law schools are all mixed up with hierarchies.

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No, not the class you sit in. This column is devoted to socio-economic status, or “class.”

As I reported last week, the citation count rankings have a paucity of women, people of color, and people who didn’t go to a top 10 law school (and more likely to be from a lower socio-economic status). I had no idea that this would be a controversial proposition that the legal academy has some hierarchies that are perpetuated through its echo chamber of rankings.

The citation count rankings made me wonder about the path to getting into law school. So it was fortuitous that I found an interesting discussion by Brookings: It reports that states that compelled students to take the SAT or ACT “discovered” college-ready students of lower socio-economic status. And then Anthony Kreis (a person I’d love to have as a colleague at my school) tweeted this chart to me in the NY Times that shows some astonishing disparities based on class. This is something that schools like Yale and Harvard already know.

But that’s undergrad: How easy is it for a person of lower socioeconomic status to be accepted into and succeed in a top 10 law school? How easy is it for them to become law professors?

Let’s start with what some call “history.” Richard Sander wrote an excellent article in the Denver Law Review titled “Class In American Legal Education.” His conclusions were troubling. To be a law student essentially meant coming from privilege, with rare exception. Or, in his words: “The vast majority of American law students come from relatively elite backgrounds; this is especially true at the most prestigious law schools, where only five percent of all students come from families whose SES is in the bottom half of the national distribution.”

Of course, the usual route to be a law professor is to first graduate from law school. And if you want to publish in the top 10 law reviews or be well cited, a top law school. According to my perusal of Sisk et. al.’s study of most cited legal scholars, none of the top five schools listed in terms of scholarly impact have any faculty members listed who did NOT graduate from a top 10 law school. In other words, in the top impact law schools, NO ONE in the top third (in terms of impact) come from a lower socio-economic status, when I use law school ranking as a proxy.

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Now, it might be that things have changed since Sander’s study. I would find that surprising given that Sander found little change from his date of publication back to the 1960s, and given some other recent documents about economic diversity. To put this in stark terms, “one is 25 times as likely to run into a wealthy student as a low-income student at the nation’s selective campuses, and the tilt is slightly greater at the top twenty law schools.”

Eric Segall and Adam Feldman have written an excellent article questioning the initial entry barriers to teaching at elite law schools. Their answer: 94% of those who teach at elite law schools went…to those very law schools. That means your best chance of success at becoming an elite academic is…your LSAT score.

While beyond the scope of this blog post, Segall and Feldman report that 30% of those academics at top 10 law schools are women. I just thought you should know in case you were wondering about how that impacts citation counts.

In other words, the fate of an academic (or someone who wants to be an academic) is sealed well before many of us ever contemplated being an academic. As I mentioned last week, 70% of the law review articles published in top ten journals in 2017 were from authors whose alma maters were….top 10 law schools. So, “Your best chances of getting published in a top ten law journal are if you graduated from a top ten school. Your best chances of getting strong citation counts are if you publish in a top 10 journal. Your best chances of getting into academia are if you come from one of the top 10 schools…..” Privilege begets privilege. ‘Twas ever thus.

I’m not suggesting that legal academia needs to ignore gender and race and focus on class. There are dangers to doing so. I’m suggesting that it is equally important for purposes of a diverse academy to consider socio-economic status.

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I also find it a bit amusing that some who tout the need for student diversity often become exceptionally defensive when looking at their own privilege and the need for academic diversity. I’m not suggesting that those of you who are at elite law schools or who have elite law review placements don’t deserve kudos. It is simultaneously possible to accept that you have been benefitted by privilege based on your race, class, or gender and also continue to value your own writing and scholarship and continue to have it valued.

And it shouldn’t have to be the female professors to be the ONLY ones to speak out against sexism in legal academia. Professors of color shouldn’t have to be the ONLY ones to speak out against racism. Professors from lower socio-economic status shouldn’t have to be the ONLY ones to speak out against classism.

Hierarchies, as a friend pointed out to me over dinner, are anti-intellectual. They should concern us ALL. And, as another friend stated, “It occurs to me that we in legal academia and the legal profession generally have an unhealthy relationship to rankings of all kinds. We dutifully profess skepticism and then proceed to spread and amplify.” In other words, we cling onto our privilege while talking about how awful it is that there are those who don’t have it.

So, what the heck are we doing here, if not fetishizing the very thing we curse?

As Stephen Jay Gould said, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, an attack on biodeterminism and the reification of IQ tests and their inherent biases: ““We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within,” whether it is IQ test, LSAT score, etc.

I worry about this hierarchy’s impact on legal academia. As I wrote recently in a forthcoming piece, “The quest for external validation does not, on its own, improve society. For one, external validation typically is achieved through conformity and hierarchy. Perpetuating the status-quo is less likely to lead to any innovation, particularly for those who are rewarded by the status-quo. In addition, some of the most forward thinking ideas were met with open hostility from the academy, and while most academics focus on the here and now, one’s work lasts a lifetime and should not be judged merely in the present.”

EXCULPATORY LANGUAGE: I ask that if you have any comments or questions about my post today that you ask me before you make an assumption. Or, if you don’t feel like doing that, you can just berate me on Twitter. I’m getting used to that.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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