Law Schools

Stopping Racism In Law Schools: A First Step

Start by hiring more professors who aren’t homogenous.

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It happened again. More professors saying racist things. It keeps happening. It’s almost as if — hear me out here — the racism is more pervasive than just the random people saying racial epithets or declaring that Black and Brown students never do well in the racist’s class. And then there are professors like Amy Wax, who are a stone’s throw away from being a Social Darwinist.

Do we want to change that dynamic? If so, we need to start by hiring more Black and Brown professors.

How do we, as the legal academy, do that?

Most law professors come from only a handful of law schools with high LSATs. Those schools are not known for their diversity. (I’ll pause here for people to tell me the schools are getting better, and some of their best friends …) So, by definition, the fixation on the fiction that ONLY those schools can produce excellent scholars and teachers will lead to a mostly white academy. I mean, we’ve been doing this for decades: WHO KNEW? Well, everyone who isn’t white.

So, for example, if you want more Black law professors, looking to Yale to create the diversity for you is a fool’s errand. Even if you went all of top 30, you only get an 8% Black admission rate.

And maybe that’s the scam. An excellent article by Carliss Chatman and Najarian Peters discusses the “soft-shoe and shuffle” of law schools in their (sometimes fake) quest to get more Black and Brown faculty. The article lays out every damn excuse faculty hiring committees use to excuse their unwillingness to hire minority faculty. And it describes the atrocities committed by faculty members during flybacks and faculty meetings.   Schools attempt to fix this with Diversity and Inclusion committees (wonder who is disproportionately on those), but nothing changes. My reading of Chatman and Peters suggests that’s the damned point: Keep the status quo, pretend to do something.

Part of the racism is blended with class (and gender, and … yeah, intersectionality matters).  As my coauthored article suggests, the path from high school to elite law school is a perilous journey for those born without privilege. In high school, absent compulsory SAT and ACT testing, many people from lower socioeconomic status won’t even know they are college ready, let alone go to a Top 10 undergraduate school. Even so, that’s a far cry from someone whose parents paid for them to have those expensive test prep classes.

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The elite universities themselves reflect the institutional barriers that arise from race, class, and gender. Once a student gets to an undergraduate institution, the notion that SES plays a role is fairly uncontroversial. It is difficult to escape one’s class. To get to an elite law school, a prospective student needs to have a good LSAT. SES plays a role here as well. Standardized tests are well known to favor those of higher SES. Even students from lower SES who do well on standardized tests may not choose to go to an elite institution. This is not, or at least should not be, a controversial proposition. The elite schools themselves recognize this phenomenon. More handwringing of the type Chatman and Peters describe.

We haven’t even discussed the barriers that minority faculty face when they are ON the faculty. The extra service. The extra teaching. The tax on their status that often deprives them of the opportunities that white faculty have to write and research.

So, how do we get racism in law school? We keep doing the same thing we’re doing! We keep hiring people from a small number of schools. We keep hiring people who come from privilege. People who have only been on one side of a police interaction! To the extent we continue to hire people with small, narrow differences we will continue to have these issues. Because the world of the law student will be much larger than that of the combined experiences of their professors.

Law schools claim to be working on that diversity issue (on the student side).  All the law professors who have come out to defend Wax and the Georgetown professors claim they are correct. I’ll assume for a brief moment that they are correct (hint: they aren’t). If they are correct, what would it say about a law school that admits students who it fully expects to do poorly merely so it can bolster its diversity numbers and grab some tuition dollars?

Doesn’t that scream fraud?

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So, by all means, let’s express outrage about such videos. We can have a grand AALS discussion. After that discussion, we can yet again turn back to their fixation on rankings, LSAT scores, and hiring professors from only a few elite law schools who tend to be mostly white.

Because none of those things are racist at all, right?

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). Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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