Law School Faculty Diversity Getting Better, But Top-Ranked Law Schools Still Have Room For Improvement

Diversity in the legal profession is an important issue and over the past two decades, law schools have made serious strides towards improving minority representation within their faculties.  However, it appears there is still room for improvement -- especially at law schools in the top tier of the USNEWS rankings.  Ming Zhu, a recent graduate from Harvard Law School and aspiring academic, recently authored a report entitled "An Empirical Study of Race and Law School Hiring," in the hope that she could uncover whether race is a factor in law school hiring decisions.

Zhu studied American Association of Law Schools (AALS) recruiting data from 2004-05 and examined the professional qualifications of almost 890 candidates in that year's applicant pool.  Among the 191 applicants who actually received offers for academic jobs the following year, Zhu found that minorities actually fared better than whites -- in some cases, much better.  When examining the race of the successful candidates, 42.9% of Asian applicants, 29.2% of Latino and 24.4% of Black candidates received offers; compared with only 21.1% of the White candidates who received offers. 

Zhu cautions that "[t]aken alone, these results seem like a good sound-byte for the argument that minorities are being preferred in faculty hiring."  However when she examined the law schools where those candidates received job offers, Zhu found that minorities did "considerably worse than non-minorities in terms of placement."  According to the study, no minorities were hired by any T16 law school (according to USNEWS's law rankings for 2005) during that recruiting season.  

Zhu warns that "given the limited scope of this study, particularly in regards to the use of only one year of [AALS] data, one should hesitate to draw any hard conclusions."  But, she goes on to conclude that the data clearly demonstrates, "Race, or a set of factors correlating with race, is having a definite effect on a candidate’s success in becoming a law professor."

This is a really interesting read and if you'd like to read the entre study, you can download it here.  The National Law Journal also published a nice summary here.

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