Law Schools

Want More Lawyer Diversity? Sure, Axe The LSAT, But The Real Problem Is Inside The Profession

To actually increase minority representation in the legal field, we lawyers may have to do something truly radical....

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bar exam scantron multiple choiceLawyers have a knack for identifying a problem far too late, overthinking it, and then advancing the wrong solution. Now, attorneys are bringing our unique acumen for misguidedness paired with ineffectualness to the entrance exam that aspiring lawyers need to take in order to get into law school, the LSAT.

You may have heard that an American Bar Association committee has recommended that law schools eliminate “a valid and reliable admission test” as part of the required law school admissions process. Well, this must be a big deal: The New York Times reported on it. Ever heard of it?

Of course, because all lawyers are apparently obligated to be mealy-mouthed and leave plenty of linguistic room to maneuver if any criticism is leveled against them, they didn’t say “eliminate the LSAT,” even though that’s what they meant. This small committee also fell all over itself to issue reassurances that individual law schools could still consider LSAT scores if they’d like to (the committee continued to use a euphemism for LSAT scores, but c’mon). This is not a final decision, and this recommendation will be discussed at a larger ABA council meeting later this month.

I guess this being big news depends on a head-scratching public not knowing that not requiring the LSAT is already sort of how things work at law schools. There are now over half a dozen law schools which do not require applicants to take the LSAT, and the list is growing. Turns out it’s really up to the law schools what they do and do not require for admissions decisions (although risking ABA accreditation is a big deal for law schools, and the law schools — at least the lower-ranked ones — do have to nod to ABA standards for that).

The ABA also ultimately has zero real power in deciding what any jurisdiction requires to be admitted to practice law — the ABA just makes recommendations (which most jurisdictions happily adopt wholeheartedly). You’ve gotta hand it to the ABA: for being externally endowed with no real power, they’ve really managed to burrow far deeper into the very fabric of their field than has any other profession’s trade group.

Anyway, no law school is currently required to require prospective students to take the LSAT. They just do it because it’s generally super useful for them. The current ABA standard requires law schools to consider “a valid and reliable admission test” for first-year applicants, but it doesn’t say what that really means, and apparently the GRE is just fine for meeting that standard. As are, potentially, the ACT and the SAT, which law school applicants all generally had to take already anyway to get into their undergraduate institutions.

Having some kind of score — an actual number — is very useful in filling limited slots for new students, and in distributing a limited number of merit-based scholarships. You ultimately have to rank people somehow. Sorry if I’m the first to report to you that we live in a stratified society.

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Still, the LSAT is perhaps not the best way to sort the wheat from the chaff in law school applicant pools. Many people complain, correctly, that there are racial disparities in LSAT scores. Yet there are also demographic disparities in grades, writing abilities, and just about any other criterion that you could use to judge the adeptness of one person when compared to another.

Also, for those people, bless ‘em, who just don’t like high-pressure tests, I must point out: there’s this little thing called THE BAR EXAM at the end of law school. If you’re going to do quite poorly on tests in life, it’s probably better to discover that before you have wasted three years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While eliminating testing entirely perhaps is not the best solution, replacing the LSAT with the general graduate school test, the GRE, couldn’t hurt. Anything to leave more non-legal options open to students longer is alright in my book.

If you really want to do something for diversity in the legal profession though, best look beyond the LSAT. We really don’t have that much of a problem anymore with getting women and ethnically diverse candidates in the door of the legal profession: the majority of law students are now women, and almost a third of law students identify as a member of a racial or ethnic minority.

The real problem is with keeping them. Among equity partners at law firms, more than four out of five are white and male.

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So, don’t entirely blame our old friend the LSAT. Maybe it is finally time to put that horse out to pasture. But to actually increase minority representation in the legal field, we lawyers may have to do something truly radical: promote people who come from different backgrounds and who don’t necessarily look or think exactly like everyone who is already here.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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