Yale University

Source: Bigstock

A fascinating test case of the rule of law in America is whether or not law schools are obeying the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision in the summer of 2023 finding affirmative action in undergraduate admissions to be a violation of the 14th Amendment’s promise of “equal protection of the laws.”

That ruling against Harvard College didn’t exactly necessarily apply to law school admissions, but come on…you law school deans are supposed to be able to figure out its implications.

The American Bar Association has now published the data on first law classes enrolled after the Supreme Court’s decision, so we can see who is naughty and who is nice.

I will focus on the 19 law schools with median LSAT scores of 170 (Vanderbilt, UCLA, Berkeley, Duke, and Boston U.) to 175 (Yale). These account for a little over 14 percent of all law students, and a higher percentage of those who will graduate, more of those who will pass the bar exam, and an especially huge percentage of those who will get hired by Big Law firms to work on corporate deals at starting salaries around $225,000. You often hear about the top 14 law schools that you must attend to be hired to work on major corporate contracts, but nobody seems able to agree on precisely who they are. So a top 19 list works well.

There are plenty of fine law schools for other types of lawyers, such as criminal justice. For example, Kamala Harris was admitted to San Francisco’s Hastings Law School (now called UC San Francisco for racial reckoning reasons) under an affirmative action program, which launched her as a prosecutor on her fabulous political career. But if you want to clerk for a federal judge (as about a quarter of Yale and U. of Chicago grads do) or get paid lavishly to grind away on mergers & acquisitions, you probably ought to attend a law school with a median score of 170 or higher. (By the way, LSAT scoring appears to have gotten slightly easier in recent years, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t score that stratospherically.)

In 2023, the 19 law schools with median LSATs of 170 to 175 enrolled 437 black first-year students out of a total of 5,597 students, or 7.8 percent.

Unfortunately, only about 35 blacks in the whole country scored 170 or higher in 2022–2023. (I’m estimating that figure using Excel’s Normdist function with 10,040 black LSAT takers with a mean of 143.64 and a standard deviation of 9.78.)

That would mean there is an average of about two black students per year with the cognitive horsepower to fit into the middle of the class for each of the 19 top law schools.

But in 2023 the two top-scoring law schools, Yale and Harvard, alone had 66 blacks in their first-year classes. So, they likely absorbed a very large fraction of the three dozen or so blacks scoring in the 170s.

Thus, it’s likely that some of the next 17 law schools didn’t enroll a single black student with the school’s median LSAT score or better. But you aren’t supposed to mention that. Penn law professor Amy Wax is being suspended and fined half a year’s pay for pointing out that Penn’s black students seldom perform in the top half.

So for every one black performing well enough on the LSAT to fit in nicely at a top 19 law school, there were 95 whites, Asians, and other unprivileged miscellaneous.

And, nationally, there were about 81 Hispanics scoring 170–180. Plus perhaps a half-dozen high scorers from other privileged ethnicities such as American Indians, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and “Canadian Indigenous.”

In contrast, there were about 2,037 whites, 633 Asians, 344 no responses, and 337 multiracials (mostly white and Asian) acing the LSAT. That adds up to 3,351 racially disprivileged test-takers scoring 170–180 compared with about 120 to 125 Underrepresented Minorities.

Being a really good lawyer is hard. Writing contracts is like coding a computer, just using a programming language from the 15th century with a lot of Norman French terms like escheatment.

And yet in 2023, blacks made up 7.8 percent of the first-years at the top 19 law schools rather than the 1 percent or so they’d make up at the top half-dozen law schools without DEI racial preferences.

Barack Obama makes an interesting test case of the size of the racial gap. He probably turned his life around at age 26 by scoring either at the 94th or, most likely, 98th percentile on the LSAT. Within a few weeks of his showing up at Harvard Law School and demonstrating that he could hang with the outstanding white students in classroom discussions, he was already being talked about as America’s First Black President.

And yet 800 whites per year score at the 98th percentile on the LSAT.

So what happened in 2024 in response to the Supreme Court declaring affirmative action a violation of the civil rights of Asians and whites?

The New York Times focused on Harvard:

Black Student Enrollment at Harvard Law Drops by More Than Half

After a Supreme Court decision ended race-based admissions, some law schools saw a decline in Black and Hispanic students entering this fall. Harvard appeared to have the steepest drop.

…Harvard Law enrolled 19 first-year Black students, or 3.4 percent of the class, the lowest number since the 1960s, according to the data from the American Bar Association. Last year, the law school’s first-year class had 43 Black students….

But Harvard Law School was anomalous. Yale, the most prestigious law school, boosted its black share from 11.4 percent in 2023 to 12.2 percent. Stanford spit in the Supreme Court’s eye, soaring from 6.9 percent black before the Supreme Court had its say to 12.4 afterward.

Overall, the top 19’s black share dropped from 7.8 percent last year to 7.1 percent this year, with Harvard’s decline of 24 black students accounting for more than three-fourths of those schools’ decline from 437 to 406 blacks.

Hispanic share in the top 19 was down slightly from 11.5 percent in 2023 to 11.0 percent in 2024.

But so was the white share, down from 51.7 percent to 50.7 percent among elite law schools.

Asians soared from 13.4 percent to 20.2 percent, but some of that increase is due to the ABA unhelpfully choosing this year, when the public might be especially interested in how closely law schools are obeying the, you know, law, to change its methodology to now require foreign students to pick a race. The NYT reported:

The A.B.A. changed its reporting categories this year to include students who were not U.S. residents in the racial and ethnic breakdown of the class. Last year, they were a separate category.

Similarly, most undergraduate colleges excuse foreigners from having to pick an American race to check.

The change complicates year-to-year comparisons, and could help explain why some schools, like New York University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, had big increases in Asian students.

Overall, it looks like very little changed despite the Supreme Court’s ruling:

What Harvard Law did seems similar to MIT cutting their black share of undergrads from a ridiculous 15 percent in 2023 to a compromise 5 percent in 2024: MIT is obviously still using a lot of affirmative action to make its freshman class 5 percent rather than 1 percent black, but it at least shows some respect for the Constitution.

In contrast, Yale and Stanford law schools are flat-out insulting the Supreme Court.

But what nobody seems to wonder about other than college presidents and law school deans, not even Supreme Court justices, is the Asian-black IQ gap if we switch to a meritocracy.

Unlike in math test scores, whites long held a small lead over Asians in average LSAT score. But in this decade, Asians have pulled slightly ahead of whites on the LSAT.

There are now 18 times as many Asians as blacks scoring 170 or better on the LSAT, whereas in 2012 there were only 13 times as many.

Is America ready for blacks to only get their rightful 1 percent of the spots in superelite institutions, while Asians come to dominate?