May 2006
President's Report on Law School Diversity

WHEREAS the National Bar Association is the oldest and largest organization of attorneys and judges of color in the world, founded in 1925, and today representing over 20,000 lawyers, judges, legal scholars and law students internationally;

WHEREAS, the National Bar Association believes that, in order for the American justice system to achieve its mission, it must value and embody racial, ethnic and gender diversity;

WHEREAS, the National Bar Association supports programs that increase opportunities for people of color to participate fully in the legal profession;

WHEREAS enrollment of African-American students at ABA-approved law schools has decreased since peaking in 1994 despite the approval since then of 15 new law schools and a substantial increase in overall law school enrollment;

WHEREAS the number of African-American graduates of ABA-approved law schools has decreased since peaking in 1998 despite an increase in overall law school graduates;

WHEREAS the number of African-American applicants to ABA-approved law schools for the September 2005 entering class dropped at nearly double the national rate;

WHEREAS respected legal educators and members of the Law School Admissions Council who gathered at the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights at St. John's University on September 7, 2005 for a national conference on "The LSAT, U.S. News & World Report, and Minority Admissions" concluded that some law schools may be raising their minimum LSAT requirements contrary to LSAC guidelines in order to boost their U.S. News & World Report rankings;

WHEREAS some law schools have been required by the ABA to raise their minimum LSAT requirements, and have seen their African-American enrollment decrease substantially as a result, without any published data or studies demonstrating that these practices have a valid educational purpose;

WHEREAS over-reliance on the LSAT contrary to LSAC guidelines has a disparate impact on the admissions of students of color;

WHEREAS practices that have a disparate impact on the admission of minority students, particularly African-American and Latino students, shift the burden of proof to those responsible for the practices to demonstrate a valid educational purpose justifying the practices; and

WHEREAS the ABA Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar is currently considering proposed changes in the Standards for Approval of Law Schools relating to equal opportunity, diversity, and non-discrimination;

1. Strengthening proposed changes in the Standards for Approval of Law Schools to require that law schools shall make greater efforts to promote diversity in legal education within the limits allowed by law;

2. Adopting standards prohibiting misuse of the LSAT contrary to LSAC guidelines for the law school admissions process;

3. Requiring that admissions and accreditation practices that have a disparate impact on enrollment of students of color be valid, reliable, and supported by published studies correlating those practices with increased professional competence; and

4. Increasing the transparency of law school admissions and accreditation practices that have a disparate impact on enrollment of students of color by making the basis for those practices public and providing public access to the data and studies supporting those practices. .

The disturbing reality in American legal education today is that many schools are affirmatively denying admission to qualified minority applicants, whose credentials would have qualified them for admission just a few years ago, by artificially raising minimum LSAT requirements to respond to the media rankings game, which pegs a school's rank in part based on admitted students' LSAT scores. And other schools that want to increase the diversity of the profession by reducing the significance of the LSAT in race-blind admissions policies are being forced to choose between diversity and compliance with accreditation requirements that have not been justified with valid and reliable studies correlating these requirements with increased professional competence.

The Law School Admissions Council, which designs and administers the LSAT, has said that the test "was never intended to serve as a measure of 'merit' . . . [and] measures only a limited set of skills." LSAC has also said that the test does not assess many skills and attributes that are integrally related to success as a lawyer and cannot come close to accounting for all the factors that contribute to an individual student's success or failure in law school.

Over-emphasis on the LSAT and the damaging effect this is having on the diversity of the legal profession is the real story that needs to be told about law school admissions and accreditation practices. That is why the National Bar Association has called on the Council of the Section on Legal Education to adopt standards that would require that any admissions or accreditation practice that has a disparate impact on students of color must be validly correlated with increased professional competence, and to increase the transparency of its accreditation practices by making the basis for those practices public and providing public access to the data and studies supporting those practices. Only then will all Americans have a full and fair opportunity to pursue their dreams of serving the public as members of the bar.