My long-time colleague Eugene has invited me to guest-blog for a few days about my soon-to-be-published but already-leaked-to-the-media-by-my-critics article about affirmative action (you can download a copy here). I’m delighted to particpate, especially if it leads to some lively discussion and feedback. The article is long, even by the bloated standards of legal academia, so my plan is to write four short pieces, next Monday through Thursday, on four different aspects of racial preferences by law schools:
–How does affirmative action in law schools work? (Monday)
–How do racial preferences affect the performance of blacks in law school and on the bar? (Tuesday)
–How do racial preferences affect how blacks do in the job market for lawyers? (Wednesday)
–What would the black bar look like if we abolished or limited racial preferences? (Thursday)
Each day, I’ll end by responding to comments on earlier posts. As Eugene suggested, there are a few things that make my work on this topic unusual. First, I’m somewhere in the liberal-left spectrum on most issues, and I’ve worked actively in civil rights (especially on the issue of housing segregation) through most of my career. So my generally negative conclusions about affirmative action put me at odds with many close friends (not to mention former funders). Second, the study is heavily data-driven. Good longitudinal datasets on law students and lawyers have only recently become available, making it possible to ask questions that we could only speculate about before. Third, my interest in affirmative action policies of law schools is not whether they betray general normative goals, whether they are unfair to whites, or whether they have subtle negative effects on blacks — instead, I’m focused on whether the policies meet their simplest goals of producing more and better black lawyers. I was surprised and dismayed to find that, in most cases, the policies fail at this basic level.
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