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The Importance of Students and Faculty Diversity in Law Schools: One Dean\u27s Perspective
No full textThis Essay builds on the premise that diversity is highly relevant to evaluating the quality of a law school and the education of its student body. It sketches the arguments for the importance of a multitude of diversities – racial, socioeconomic, gender, and more – for U.S. law schools in their student bodies and faculties to best achieve their educational mission. Borrowing liberally from the Supreme Court’s rejection of a constitutional challenge to the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious admissions program in Grutter v. Bollinger, Part I of this Essay considers the educational benefits offered by a diverse law student body. Part II outlines the similar, yet somewhat different, teaching and scholarship benefits that a diverse law faculty bring to a high quality legal education. Part III outlines the educational importance of diversity among law students and faculty based on a wide array of experiences, characteristics, and knowledge other than race. Part IV of this Essay summarizes some of the legal restrictions, as well as limited incentives, for deans and law schools engaged in the active pursuit of diversity among students and faculty
After Tenure Study U.S. Law Schools Institutional Database
Get PDFThe After Tenure study, jointly funded by the American Bar Foundation and Law School Admission Council, is the first in-depth examination of the professional lives of post-tenure law professors in the United States. It combines a national survey of post-tenure law professors in the U.S. (undertaken in 2005-2006) with a set of follow-up interviews (conducted with a subset of the survey respondents in 2007-2008). A total of 1,175 professors completed the survey; along with 49 who answered substantial parts of the survey.
This database includes a subset of law school variables used for analyses in the larger study. Variables include: School Code Name of Law School City, State Region Population Census Classification School Rankings Ranking Tier Faculty Statistic
Mapping Lawyer Competencies Onto the Law School Curriculum to Confirm that Graduates are Prepared for Law Practice
No full textThis article describes how to define lawyer competencies from a variety of professional, research, and institutional sources, in order to map them against a law school curriculum. The article explains how a table of lawyer competencies can help lawyers, law firms, and law schools ensure adequate professional preparation and development. It then tests popular myths and common premises regarding lawyer competencies. The article concludes from its study of lawyer competencies that legal education should continue its present reforms to further integrate and align instruction to practice competencies
Class in American Legal Education
No full textThe purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to uncover and explore some of the basic facts about socioeconomic diversity in law schools, and second, to compare racial and “class” diversity as objectives that law schools should pursue
How Scholarship Programs Impact Students and The Culture of Law School
No full textThis article focuses on three key areas. First, it attempts to describe how different scholarship models might impact recruiting by analyzing how two “identical” law schools embracing these two different approaches to scholarships likely would yield first-year classes with different compositions. Second, the article describes what law schools actually do in terms of scholarship programs, explains why law schools might embrace different scholarship models, and explores how scholarship programs with different renewal criteria likely would impact the well-being of law students and the competitive environment of the two law schools. Third, this article describes best practices and makes recommendations regarding appropriate disclosure of information regarding scholarship program
Fostering Professional Formation (Professionalism): Lessons from the Carnegie Foundation’s Five Studies on Educating Professionals
No full textThe American Bar Association is going to change the accreditation standards for law schools to require more emphasis on each student’s professional formation. Professional formation refers to the fostering of students’ formation of an ethical professional identity. This change from a focus on educational inputs like a course on professional responsibility to a focus on clearly-articulated learning outcomes relating to each student’s ethical development that are assessable is a major paradigm shift in legal education.
Legal educators and the profession itself can learn a great deal from the five Carnegie studies of higher education in medicine, nursing, clergy, engineering, and law concerning professional formation. From the turn of the century to 2010, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching conducted dozens of site visits to study how professional schools educate physicians, nurses, clergy, engineers, and lawyers. From these studies, the president of the Carnegie Foundation, Lee Shulman, found that “the most overlooked aspect of professional preparation was the formation of a professional identity with a moral core of service and responsibility,” while the Carnegie foundation’s final study, Educating Physicians, found that “formation [is] the fundamental goal of the learning process,” and “professional formation [is] the purpose that should guide medical education.” This paper provides an analysis of the five Carnegies studies that will guide law faculties in defining learning outcomes for professional formation that are assessable and in selecting the pedagogies most effective to achieve the defined learning outcomes
The Business Case for Diversity: Reality or Wishful Thinking?
No full textThis report, “The Business Case for Diversity 2011: Reality or Wishful Thinking?” helps answer two basic questions: Is the oftdiscussed business case for diversity truly creating a more diverse and inclusive legal profession? If not, how can the business case be more effective? IILP believes this report is significant in providing comprehensive data, many for the first time, that measure underlying issues, phenomena and perceptions. To be sure, there is a great deal of anecdotal commentary on diversity and inclusion in the legal profession; and certainly there are other important statistical analyses. But we believe this study provides new facts and insights that will be critical in pursuing the goal of real change, including in regard to economic factors, in the profession
J.D. and LL.B. Degrees Awarded by Gender, 1981-2011
No full textThis source includes data on the number of law degrees awarded by gender for the years 1981 to 2011
The Promise of Grutter: Diverse Interactions at the University of Michigan Law School
No full textIn Grutter v. Bollinger, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School on the grounds of educational diversity. Yet the Court\u27s assumption that admitting diverse students into law school would result in improved race relations, livelier classroom conversations, and better professional outcomes for students has never been empirically tested. This Article relies on survey and focus group data collected at the University of Michigan Lav School campus itself in March 2010 to examine not only whether, but how diversity affects learning. The data indicate both that there are sufficient numbers of students of color on the University of Michigan Law School campus to yield diverse interactions and that positive interracial student exchanges are occurring. Nevertheless, the lively discussions drawing from this diversity anticipated by the Grutter Court are seldom taking place within the classroom, where they may be most important; by neglecting to foster diversity discussions, law schools are failing to cultivate the academic and professional benefits associated with educational diversity. Only through classroom diversity can the promise of diversity envisioned by the Grutter Court be fully realized
Predicting Lawyer Effectiveness: Broadening the Basis for Law School Admissions Decisions
No full textLaw school admission decisions are heavily influenced by a student’s undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score. These measures, although predictive of first-year law school grades, make no effort to predict professional competence and, for the most part, they do not. These measures also create adverse impact on applicants from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. This article describes the rationale for and process by which we explored new tests to predict lawyer effectiveness rather than law school grades and reports results of a multiyear empirical study involving over 3,000 graduates from Berkeley Law School and Hastings College of the Law. Tests measuring personality constructs, interests, values, and judgment predicted lawyering competency but had little or no adverse impact on underrepresented minority applicants. Combined with the LSAT and UGPA, these broader tests could assess law applicants on the basis both of projected professional effectiveness and academic indicators