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Affirmative Action and Fixed Intelligence
September 6th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I wrote this summer about a study demonstrating a worrisome trend among minority law students: They received lower grades than white peers with similar LSAT scores, undergraduate achievements, and work experience. Part of the problem, I suggested in a second post, may stem from the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. When individuals are placed in situations in which a group stereotype suggests that they will perform badly, they do just that. Remove the stereotype threat and performance improves to match that of other individuals with similar experience and abilities.
Stereotype threat arises in part from the implicit racial bias that permeates our culture. If professors, classmates, friends, and family members see minority students as less capable than white ones, those perceptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Unconscious bias, unfortunately, is invisible only to the holders of that bias; targets readily perceive the negative assumptions and respond to them.
What About Affirmative Action?
How does affirmative action affect this dynamic? Some critics of affirmative action suggest that special admissions programs simply aggravate stereotype threat–ultimately harming the students they intend to help. Minority students, they reason, know that at least some members of their group lack the credentials of white students; they are “less qualified” to attend law school than their peers. This knowledge, critics reason, will trigger an extreme form of stereotype threat. Knowing that their racial/ethnic group is less qualified than the dominant white group–and that professors know this–minority students will perform poorly.
Does this phenomenon explain the poor performance of minority students in law schools? Should we abandon all traces of affirmative action to improve the achievements of minority students?
Not from my perspective. Instead, we need to examine our own attitudes toward affirmative action. Those attitudes, which inform a law school’s culture, spell the difference between programs that assist minority students and those that may harm them. To explain this, we also need to explore the nature of intelligence: Is an individual’s intelligence fixed at some point early in life? Or is it fluid? I will explore these issues in a series of posts.
Fixed-Intelligence Affirmative Action
Many critics of affirmative action assume that intelligence is fixed. When we admit minority students with lower LSAT scores than their white classmates, these critics assume, we know that the minority students will perform more poorly in law school. They have less law-related intelligence (as measured by LSAT tests) and, thus, are fated to lower performance.
These critics acknowledge that intelligence is not the only factor affecting achievement. Hard work, catch-up tutoring, and faculty encouragement, they concede, may improve a student’s grades. In their view, however, this simply adds to the cost of affirmative action programs. Schools must devote special resources to tutoring programs, and faculty must provide special encouragement to minority students. The pay-off, from the critics’ perspective, is small. Minority students, they argue, would fare better if they attended schools where their fixed intelligence matched that of their white peers.
Many supporters of affirmative action programs also believe in fixed intelligence. These supporters quietly assume that minority students have less law-related intelligence than their white peers, but they blame that difference on historical and contemporary discrimination. Since society has damaged minority students, these professors reason, we owe them special consideration in admissions. We should give them the opportunities they might have had if they had not experienced a lifetime of overt and subtle discrimination. With hard work, special tutoring, and faculty encouragement, at least some of these students will achieve more than their predictors indicate. Even those who finish near the bottom of the class will benefit from the reputation and network connections of a more prestigious school than one they might have attended without affirmative action.
These attitudes, whether expressed critically or supportively, may well reduce the performance of minority students. In addition to creating stereotype threat, these attitudes tell minority students: “Intelligence is fixed by the time students enter law school and, for whatever reason, yours is lower than that of your classmates.” As we’ll see in my next post, belief in fixed intelligence harms students as much as stereotype threat. Minority students, therefore, suffer a double injury when surrounded by these attitudes.
These attitudes, it’s important to note, need not be overt to affect students. Few professors announce to their classes: “Your intelligence is fixed. You’ve either got it or you don’t. See you at the end of the semester.” The beliefs, however, are there. Law school, in fact, seems centered on a theory of fixed intelligence. Our focus on LSAT scores (aggravated by the US News ranking competition), the lack of feedback designed to enhance performance, and the strict grading curves suggest that we believe our students’ intelligence is fixed.
Add assumptions about low-performing minority students to that mix, and you have a recipe for stereotype threat and reduced performance–even among minority students with entering credentials that match those of white peers.
Another Way
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to conceptualize affirmative action programs that is both more cognitively accurate and more supportive of minority students. If we can reform our law school culture to embrace the reality of fluid intelligence, we will reveal the true justification for affirmative action programs, allow minority students to reach their full potential, and improve learning for all students. In my next two posts, I will explore the concept of fluid intelligence and how it can inform our beliefs about affirmative action.
Can We Close the Racial Grade Gap?
July 25th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
In response to last week’s post about the racial gap in law school grades, several professors sent me articles discussing ways to ameliorate this gap. Here are two articles that readers may find useful:
1. Sean Darling-Hammond (a Berkeley Law graduate) and Kristen Holmquist (Director of Berkeley’s Academic Support Program), Creating Wise Classrooms to Empower Diverse Law Students.
2. Edwin S. Fruehwald, How to Help Students from Disadvantaged Backgrounds Succeed in Law School.
Another excellent choice is Claude Steele‘s popular book, Whistling Vivaldi. Steele, who is currently Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UC Berkeley, is a leading psychology researcher. He originated the phrase “stereotype threat,” which explains a key cognitive mechanism behind the reduced performance of minority students in higher education. In his book, Steele offers highly accessible explanations of this mechanism.
Even better, the book describes some experimentally tested approaches for reducing stereotype threat and improving performance of minority students. The psychologists have not found a magic tonic, but they are pursuing some promising ideas.
How Hard Will It Be?
Many of the ideas offered by Steele, Darling-Hammond, Holmquist, and Fruehwald rest on principles of good teaching. We should, for example, teach all of our students how to read cases and analyze statutes, rather than let them flounder to learn on their own. The analytical skills of “thinking like a lawyer” can be taught and learned; they are not simply talents that arise mysteriously in some students.
Similarly, we should cover the basics in our courses, explaining the legal system rather than brushing over those introductory chapters as “something you can read if you need to review.” The latter approach is likely to increase stereotype threat, because it suggests “you don’t belong here and you’re behind already” to students who lack that information. Besides, you’d be surprised how many law students don’t understand the concept of a grand jury–even when they take my second-year Evidence course.
Positive feedback and formative assessment are also important tools; these techniques, like the ones described above, can benefit all students. They may be especially important for minority students, however, who are likely to suffer from both social capital deficits (i.e., lack of knowledge about how to study for law school exams) and culturally imposed self doubts. By giving students opportunities to try out their law school wings, and then offering constructive feedback, we can loosen some of the handicaps that restrain performance.
Harder Than That
These approaches, as well as others mentioned in the articles at the beginning of this post, are worth trying in the classroom. I think, though, that it will be much harder than most white professors imagine to remove the clouds of stereotype threat.
In law schools, we like to imagine that racial bias happens somewhere else. We acknowledge that it occurred in the past and that some of our students still suffer inherited deficits. We also know that it happens in communities outside our walls, where bad things of all types happen. We may also concede that bias occurs in earlier stages of education, if only because many minority students attend low-performing schools.
We assume, however, that racial bias stops at our doors. Law schools, after all, are bastions of reason. Just as we refine “minds full of mush” to sharp analytic instruments, we surely wipe out any traces of bias in ourselves and out students.
This is a dangerously false belief. Race is a pervasive, deeply ingrained category in our psyches. The category may be cultural, rather than biological, but both science and everyday experience demonstrate its grip on us.
Humans, moreover, are exquisitely expressive and acutely sensitive. Micro expressions and body language convey biases we don’t consciously acknowledge. Other people receive those signals even more readily than they hear our spoken words. Reading the psychology literature on implicit bias is both humbling and eye opening. When designing cures for the racial grade gap, we need to grapple with our own unconscious behaviors–as well as with the fact that those of us who are white rarely know what it feels like (deep down, every day) to be a person of color in America.
For Example
Here’s one example of how difficult it may be to overcome the racial gap in law school grades. One useful technique, as mentioned above, is to give students supportive feedback on their work. To help minority students overcome stereotype threat, however, the feedback has to take a particular form.
On p. 162 of his book, Steele describes an experiment in which researchers offered different forms of feedback to Stanford undergraduates who had written an essay. After receiving the feedback, conveyed through extensive written comments, students indicated how much they trusted the feedback and how motivated they were to revise their essays. Importantly, students participating in the study all believed that the reader was white; they also knew that the reader would know their race because of photographs attached to the essays. (The experimental set-up made these conditions seem natural.)
White students showed little variation in how they responded to three types of feedback: (1) “unbuffered” feedback in which they received mostly critical comments and corrections on their essays; (2) “positive” feedback in which these comments were prefaced by a paragraph of the “overall nice job” kind; and (3) “wise” feedback in which the professor noted that he had applied a particularly high standard to the essay but believed the student could meet that standard through revision. All three of these feedback forms provided similar motivation to white students.
For Black students, however, the type of feedback generated significantly different results. The unbuffered feedback produced mistrust and little motivation; the Black students believed that the reader had stereotyped them as poor performers. Feedback prefaced by a positive comment was better; Black students were more likely to trust the feedback and feel motivated to improve. The wise feedback, however, was best of all. When students felt that a professor recognized their individual talent, and was willing to help them develop that talent, they responded enthusiastically.
Some researchers refer to this as the “Stand and Deliver” phenomenon, named for the story of a high school teacher who inspired his underprivileged Mexican-American students to learn calculus. Professors who set high standards, while conveying sincere signals that minority students can meet those standards, can close enormous achievement gaps.
Sincerity
The key word in the previous paragraph is “sincere.” To overcome stereotype threat and other forces restraining our minority students, it’s not enough to offer general messages of encouragement to a class. That worked for Jaime Escalante, the teacher who taught his disadvantaged students calculus, because he was talking to students who all suffered from disadvantage. Delivering the same message to a law school class in which most students are white won’t have much impact on the minority students. The minority students will assume that the professor is speaking primarily to the white students; if anything, this will increase stereotype threat.
Nor will individualized messages work if they follow our usual “overall nice job” format. I cringed when I read those words in the study described by Steele. How often have I written those very words on a paper that needed lots of improvement?
Instead, we have to find ways to convey individually to minority students that we believe they can meet very high standards. That’s a tough challenge because many of us (especially white professors) suffer from implicit biases telling us otherwise. Even if we use the right words, will our tone of voice, micro expressions, and body language signal those unconscious doubts?
Moving Forward
Some readers may dismiss my worry about unconscious bias; they may be certain that they view students of all races equally. Others may be discouraged by my concern, feeling that it is impossible to overcome these biases. Indeed, Steele and others have documented a phenomenon in which whites avoid close interactions with minorities because they fear that they will display their unconscious bias.
A third group of readers may whisper to themselves, “she’s overlooking the elephant in the room. Because of affirmative action, minority students at most law schools are less capable than their white peers.” That potential reaction is so important that I’ll address it in a separate post.
For now, I want to offer this thought to all readers: This will be hard. If we want to close the racial grade gap and help all students excel, we need to examine both our individual and institutional practices very closely. Some of that may be painful. If we can succeed, however, we will achieve a paramount goal–making our promises of racial equality tangible. Our success will affect, not only the careers of individual students, but the quality of the legal profession and the trust that citizens place in the legal system.
I will continue blogging about this issue, offering information about other cognitive science studies in the field. For those of you who would like to look at the study involving written feedback (rather than just read the summary in Steele’s book), it is: Geoffrey L. Cohen, Claude M. Steele & Lee D. Ross, The Mentor’s Dilemma: Providing Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide, 25 Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 1302 (1999).
If you want to explore the field on your own, use the database PsycINFO and search for “stereotype threat” as a phrase. Most universities have subscriptions to PsycINFO; if you are a faculty member, staff member, or student, you will be able to read full-text articles for no charge.
More on Paid Clinical Externships
July 17th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I’ve posted before about my support for a proposed change in Interpretation 305-2 of the ABA’s accreditation standards for law schools. The proposal would allow law schools to offer externship credit for paid positions. Today I sent an admittedly tardy letter to the Council, expressing the reasons for that support. For those who are interested, I reproduce the text below:
Dear Council Members:
I apologize for this late submission in response to your request for comments on the proposed change to Interpretation 305-2. I strongly support the proposed change, which would allow law schools to choose whether to offer externships with paid employers.
I have been a law professor for thirty years, teaching doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical courses. I also have a research interest in legal education and have published several articles in that field. My current interest lies in learning how lawyers develop professional expertise and in designing educational programs that will promote that development.
From my personal experience, as well as reviews of the cognitive science literature, I have no doubt that externships are a key feature of this development. Externships alone are not sufficient: In-house clinics provide pedagogic advantages (such as the opportunity for close mentoring and regular reflection) that externships are less likely to offer. A program of in-house clinics complemented by externships, simulations, and other classroom experiences, however, can offer students an excellent foundation in professional expertise.
When designing an educationally effective externship, the employer’s status (for-profit, non-profit, government) and student’s financial arrangement (paid or unpaid) are not relevant. This is because the educational institution controls the externship requirements. If an employer offering a paid externship balks at the school’s educational requirements, the school can (and should) refuse to include that employer in its program.
The key to educationally sound externships is close control by the academic institution. I suspect that some law schools (like other academic institutions) do not devote as much attention to externships as they should. The greater the school’s collaboration with the employer, the better the externship experience will be. This problem, however, applies to both paid and unpaid externships. The educational potential of externships does not depend upon the amount of pay; it depends upon the school’s willingness to supervise the externship closely—-and to reject employers that do not create suitable learning experiences.
Employers who pay law students may decide that they don’t want to participate in externship programs; they may find compliance with the program’s requirements and paperwork too onerous. This is not a reason to reject paid externships; it is an assurance that they will work properly. If an employer is willing to pay a student and comply with the pedagogic requirements of a good externship program, we should rejoice: This is an employer eager to satisfy the profession’s obligation to mentor new members.
This brings me to the major reason I support the proposal: Permission of paid externships will allow innovative partnerships between law schools and the practicing bar. As members of a profession, lawyers have a duty to educate new colleagues. Our Rules of Professional Conduct, sadly, do not explicitly recognize this duty. The obligation, however, lies at the heart of what it means to be a profession. See, e.g., Howard Gardner & Lee S. Shulman, The Professions in America Today: Crucial But Fragile, DAEDALUS, Summer 2005, at 13.
Our profession lags behind others in developing models that allow practitioners to fulfill their educational duty while still earning a profit and paying their junior members. Law school clinics and externship supervisors possess a wealth of experience that could help practitioners achieve those goals. Working together to supervise paid externships would be an excellent way to transfer these models, improve them, and serve clients.
I deliberately close by stressing clients. Many of our debates about educational practices focus on the interests of law schools, law students, and employers. For members of a profession, however, client needs are supreme. We know that an extraordinary number of ordinary Americans lack affordable legal services. We also know that businesses are increasingly turning to non-JDs to fill their legal needs as compliance officers, human resources directors, and other staff. If we want to create a world in which individuals and businesses benefit from the insights of law graduates, then we have to design educational models in which new lawyers become professionals while they and their mentors make a living.
Thank you for your attention. Please let me know if I can provide any further information.
Deborah J. Merritt
John Deaver Drinko/Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law
Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University
The White Bias in Legal Education
July 16th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Alexia Brunet Marks and Scott Moss have just published an article that analyzes empirical data to determine which admissions characteristics best predict law student grades. Their study, based on four recent classes matriculating at their law school (the University of Colorado) or Case Western’s School of Law, is careful and thoughtful. Educators will find many useful insights.
The most stunning finding, however, relates to minority students. Even after controlling for LSAT score, undergraduate GPA, college quality, college major, work experience, and other factors, minority students secured significantly lower grades than white students. The disparity appeared both in first-year GPA and in cumulative GPA. The impact, moreover, was similar for African American, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American students.
Marks and Moss caution that the number of Native American students in their database (15) was small, and that the number of Latino/a students (45) was also modest. These numbers may be too small to support definitive findings. Still, the findings for these groups were statistically significant–and consistent with those for the larger groups of African American and Asian American students.
What accounts for this disturbing difference? Why do students of color receive lower law school grades than white students with similar backgrounds?
“Something . . . About Legal Education Itself”
Marks and Moss are unable to probe this racial disparity in depth; their paper reports a wide range of empirical findings, with limited space to discuss each one. They observe, however, that their extensive controls for student characteristics suggests that the “racial disparity reflects something not merely about the students, but about legal education itself.” What is that something?
One possibility, as Marks and Moss note, is unconscious bias in grading. Most law school courses are graded anonymously, but others are not. Legal writing, seminars, clinics, and other skills courses often require identified grading. Even in large lecture courses, some professors give credit for class participation–a practice that destroys anonymity for that portion of the grade.
No one suspects that professors discriminate overtly against minority students. Implicit bias, however, is pervasive in our society. How do we as faculty know that we value the words of a minority student as highly as those offered by white students? Unless we keep very careful records, how do we know that we remember the minority student’s comments as often as the white student’s? These are questions that all educators should be willing to ask.
Another explanation lies in the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. When placed in situations in which a group stereotype suggests they will perform poorly, people often do just that. Scientists have demonstrated this phenomenon with people of all races and both genders. Math performance among White men, for example, declines if they take a test after hearing information about the superiority of Asian math students.
Legal education itself, finally, may embody practices that favor white students. Are there ways in which our culture silently nurtures white students better than students of color? I’d like to think not, but it’s hard to judge a matter like that from within the culture. Cultures are like gravity; they affect us constantly but invisibly.
Other Influences
I can think of three forces originating outside of law schools that might depress the performance of minority students. First, minorities may enter law school with fewer financial resources than their white peers. Marks and Moss were unable to control for economic background, and the minority students in their study may have come from financially poorer families than the white students. Students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds may spend more time working for pay, live in less convenient housing, and lack money for goods and services that ease academic study.
Second, minority students may have less social capital than white students. Students who have family members in the legal profession, or who know other law graduates, can commiserate with them about the challenges of law school. These students can also discuss study approaches and legal principles with their outside network. Even knowing other people who have succeeded in law school may give a student confidence to succeed. Minority students, on average, may have fewer of these supports.
In fact, minority students may suffer more than white students from negative social capital. If a student is the first in the family (or neighborhood) to attend law school, the student’s social network may tacitly suggest that she is unlikely to succeed. Minority students may also be more likely than white students to face family demands on their time; families may rely economically and emotionally on a student who has achieved such unusual success.
Finally, minority students bear emotional burdens of racism that white students simply don’t encounter. Some of those burdens are personal: the white people who cross the street to avoid a minority male, the shopkeeper who seems to hover especially close. Others are societal. We were all upset by the church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, but the tragedy was much more personal–and threatening–for African Americans. How hard it must be to continue studying the rule against perpetuities in the face of such lawlessness and racial hatred.
What Should Law Schools Do?
I don’t know the causes of the racial disparity in law student grades. One or more of the above factors may account for the problem; other influences may be at work. Whatever the causes, the data cry out for a response. Even if the discrepancy stems from the outside forces I’ve identified, law schools can’t ignore the impact of those forces. If we’re serious about racial diversity in the legal profession, we need to identify the source of the racial grade gap and remedy it.
Law schools face many challenges today, but this one is as important as any I’ve heard about. It’s time to talk about the burdens on minority students, the ways in which our culture may aggravate those burdens, and the steps we can take to open the legal profession more fully to all.
More on Rankings: Three Purposes
June 1st, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I want to continue my discussion of the law school rankings published by Above the Law (ATL). But before I do, let’s think more generally about the purpose of law school rankings. Who uses these rankings, and for what reason? Rankings may serve one or more of three purposes:
1. Focused-Purpose Rankings
Rankings in this first category help users make a specific decision. A government agency, for example, might rate academic institutions based on their research productivity; this ranking could the guide the award of research dollars. A private foundation aiming to reward innovative teaching might develop a ranking scheme more focused on teaching prowess.
US News and Above the Law advertise their rankings as focused-purpose ones: Both are designed to help prospective students choose a law school. One way to assess these rankings, accordingly, is to consider how well they perform this function.
Note that focused-purpose rankings can be simple or complex. Some students might choose a law school based solely on the percentage of graduates who secure jobs with the largest law firms. For those students, NLJ’s annual list of go-to law schools is the only ranking they need.
Most prospective students, however, consider a wider range of factors when choosing a law school. The same is true of people who use other types of focused-purpose rankings. The key function of these rankings is that they combine relevant information in a way that helps a user sort that information. Without assistance, a user could focus on only a few bits of information at a time. Focused-purpose rankings overcome that limit by aggregating some of the relevant data.
This doesn’t mean that users should (or will) make decisions based solely on a ranking scheme. Although a good scheme combines lots of relevant data, the scheme is unlikely to align precisely with each user’s preferences. Most people who look at rankings use them as a starting point. The individual adds relevant information omitted by the ranking scheme, or adjusts the weight given to particular components, before making a final decision.
A good ranking scheme in the “focused purpose” category supports this process through four features. The scheme (a) incorporates factors that matter to most users; (b) omits other, irrelevant data; (c) uses unambiguous metrics as components; and (d) allows users to disaggregate the components.
2. Prestige Rankings
Some rankings explicitly measure prestige. Others implicitly offer that information, although they claim another purpose. In either case, the need for “prestige” rankings is somewhat curious. Prestige does not inhere in institutions; it stems from the esteem that others confer upon the institution. Why do we need a ranking system to tell us what we already believe?
One reason is that our nation is very large. People from the West Coast may not know the prestige accorded Midwestern institutions. Newcomers to a profession may also seek information about institutional prestige. Some college students know very little about the prestige of different law schools.
For reasons like these, prestige rankings persist. It is important to recognize, however, that prestige rankings differ from the focused-purpose schemes discussed above. Prestige often relates to one of those focused purposes: A law school’s prestige, for example, almost certainly affects the employability of its graduates. A ranking of schools based on prestige, however, is different than a ranking that incorporates factors that prospective students find important in selecting a school.
Prestige rankings are more nebulous than focused-purpose ones. The ranking may depend simply on a survey of the relevant audience. Alternatively, the scheme may incorporate factors that traditionally reflect an institution’s prestige. For academic institutions, these include the selectivity of its admissions, the qualifications of its entering class, and the institution’s wealth.
3. Competition Rankings
Competition rankings have a single purpose: to confer honor. A competition ranking awards gold, silver, bronze, and other medals according to specific criteria. These rankings differ from the previous categories because their sole purpose is to accord honor for winning the competition.
Many athletic honors fall into this category. We honor Olympic gold medalists because they were the best at their event on a particular day, even if their prowess diminishes thereafter.
Competition rankings are most common in athletics and the arts, although they occasionally occur in academia. More commonly, as I discuss below, people misinterpret focused-purpose rankings as if they were competition ones.
US News
As noted above, US News promotes its law school ranking for a focused purpose: to help prospective students choose among law schools. Over time, however, the ranking has acquired aspects of both a prestige scheme and a competition one. These characteristics diminish the rankings’ use for potential students; they also contribute to much of the mischief surrounding the rankings.
Many professors, academic administrators, and alumni view their school’s US News rank as a general measure of prestige, not simply as a tool for prospective students to use when comparing law schools. Some of the US News metrics contribute to this perception. Academic reputation, for example, conveys relatively little useful information to potential students. It is much more relevant to measuring an institution’s overall prestige.
Even more troublesome, some of these audiences have started to treat the US News rankings as a competition score. Like Olympic athletes, schools claim honor simply for achieving a particular rank. Breaking into the top fourteen, top twenty, or top fifty becomes cause for excessive celebration.
If the US News ranking existed simply to aid students in selecting a law school, they would cause much less grief. Imagine, for example, if deans could reassure anxious alumni by saying something like: “Look, these rankings are just a tool for students to use when comparing law schools. And they’re not the only information that these prospective students use. We supplement the rankings by pointing to special features of our program that the rankings don’t capture. We have plenty of students who choose our school over ones ranked somewhat above us because they value X, Y, and Z.”
Deans can’t offer that particular reassurance, and listeners won’t accept it, because we have all given the US News rankings the status of prestige or competition scores. It may not matter much if a school is number 40 or 45 on a yardstick that 0Ls use as one reference in choosing a law school. Losing 5 prestige points, on the other hand, ruins everyone’s day.
Above the Law
I’ll offer a more detailed analysis of the ATL rankings in a future post. But to give you a preview: One advantage of these rankings over US News is that they focus very closely on the particular purpose of aiding prospective students. That focus makes the rankings more useful for their intended audience; it also avoids the prestige and competition auras that permeate the US News product.
ATL Law School Rankings
May 29th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Above the Law (ATL) has released the third edition of its law school rankings. Writing about rankings is a little like talking about intestinal complaints: We’d rather they didn’t exist, and it’s best not to mention such things in polite company. Rankings, however, are here to stay–and we already devote an inordinate amount of time to talking about them. In that context, there are several points to make about Above the Law‘s ranking scheme.
In this post, I address an initial question: Who cares about the ATL rankings? Will anyone read them or follow them? In my next post, I’ll explore the metrics that ATL uses and the incentives they create. In a final post, I’ll make some suggestions to improve ATL’s rankings.
So who cares? And who doesn’t?
Prospective Students
I think potential law students are already paying attention to the ATL rankings. Top-Law-Schools.com, a source used by many 0Ls, displays the Above the Law rankings alongside the US News (USN) list. Prospective students refer to both ranking systems in the site’s discussion forum. If prospective students don’t already know about ATL and its rankings, they will soon.
If I were a prospective student, I would pay at least as much attention to the ATL rankings than the USN ones. Above the Law, after all, incorporates measures that affect students deeply (cost, job outcomes, and alumni satisfaction). US News includes factors that seem more esoteric to a potential student.
Also, let’s face it: Above the Law is much more fun to read than US News. Does anyone read US News for any purpose other than rankings? 0Ls read Above the Law for gossip about law schools and the profession. If you like a source and read it regularly, you’re likely to pay attention to its recommendations–including recommendations in the form of rankings.
Alumni
Deans report that their alumni care deeply about the school’s US News rank. Changes in that number may affect the value of a graduate’s degree. School rank also creates bragging rights among other lawyers. We don’t have football or basketball teams at law schools, so what other scores can we brag about?
I predict that alumni will start to pay a lot of attention to Above the Law‘s ranking scheme. Sure, ATL is the site we all love to hate: Alumni, like legal educators, cringe at the prospect of reading about their mistakes on the ever-vigilant ATL. But the important thing is that they do read the site–a lot. They laugh at the foibles of others, nod in agreement with some reports, and keep coming back for more. This builds a lot of good will for Above the Law.
Equally important, whenever Above the Law mentions a law school in a story, it appends information about the school’s ATL rank. For an example, see this recent story about Harvard Law School. (I purposely picked a positive story, so don’t get too excited about following the link.)
Whenever alumni read about their law school–or any law school–in Above the Law, they will see information about ATL’s ranking. This is true even for the 150 schools that are “not ranked” by Above the Law. For them, a box appears reporting that fact along with information about student credentials and graduate employment.
This is an ingenious (and perfectly appropriate) marketing scheme. Alumni who read Above the Law will constantly see references to ATL’s ranking scheme. Many will care about their school’s rank and will pester the school’s dean for improvement. At first, they may not want to admit publicly that they care about an ATL ranking, but that reservation will quickly disappear. US News is a failed magazine; Above the Law is a very successful website. Which one do you think will win in the end?
US News, moreover, has no way to combat this marketing strategy. We’ve already established that no one reads US News for any reason other than the rankings. So US News has no way to keep its rankings fresh in the public’s mind. Readers return to Above the Law week after week.
Law Professors
Law professors will not welcome the ATL rankings. We don’t like any rankings, because they remind us that we’re no longer first in the class. And we certainly don’t like Above the Law, which chronicles our peccadilloes.
Worst of all, ATL rankings don’t fit with our academic culture. We like to think of ourselves as serious-minded people, pursuing serious matters with great seriousness. How could we respect rankings published by a site that makes fun of us and all of our seriousness? Please, be serious.
Except…professors spent a long time ignoring the US News rankings. We finally had to pay attention when everyone else started putting so much weight on them. Law faculty are not leaders when it comes to rankings; we are followers. If students and alumni care about ATL’s rankings, we eventually will pay attention.
University Administrators
People outside academia may not realize how much credence university presidents, provosts, and trustees give the US News rankings. The Board of Trustees at my university has a scorecard for academic initiatives that includes these two factors: (1) rank among public colleges, as determined by USN, and (2) number of graduate or professional programs in the USN top 25. On the first, we aim to improve our rank from 18 to 10. On the second, we hope to increase the number of highly ranked departments from 49 to 65.
These rank-related goals are no longer implicit; they are quite explicit at universities. And, although academic leaders once eschewed US News as a ranking source, they now embrace the system.
Presidents and provosts are likely to laugh themselves silly if law schools clamor to be judged by Above the Law rather than US News. At least for the immediate future, this will restrain ATL’s power within academia.
On the other hand, I remember a time (in the late 1990’s) when presidents and provosts laughed at law schools for attempting to rely upon their US News rank. “Real” academic departments had fancier ranking schemes, like those developed by the National Research Council. But US News was the kudzu of academic rankings: It took over faster than anyone anticipated.
Who’s to say that the Above the Law rankings won’t have their day, at least within legal education?
Meanwhile
Even if US News retains its primary hold on academic rankings, Above the Law may have some immediate impact within law schools. High US News rank, after all, depends upon enrolling talented students. If prospective students pay attention to Above the Law–as I predict they will–then law schools will have to do the same. To maintain class size and student quality, we need to know what students want. For that, Above the Law offers essential information
On the Bar Exam, My Graduates Are Your Graduates
May 12th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
It’s no secret that the qualifications of law students have declined since 2010. As applications fell, schools started dipping further into their applicant pools. LSAT scores offer one measure of this trend. Jerry Organ has summarized changes in those scores for the entering classes of 2010 through 2014. Based on Organ’s data, average LSAT scores for accredited law schools fell:
* 2.3 points at the 75th percentile
* 2.7 points at the median
* 3.4 points at the 25th percentile
Among other problems, this trend raises significant concerns about bar passage rates. Indeed, the President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) blamed the July 2014 drop in MBE scores on the fact that the Class of 2014 (which entered law school in 2011) was “less able” than earlier classes. I have suggested that the ExamSoft debacle contributed substantially to the score decline, but here I focus on the future. What will the drop in student quality mean for the bar exam?
Falling Bar Passage Rates
Most observers agree that bar passage rates are likely to fall over the coming years. Indeed, they may have already started that decline with the July 2014 and February 2015 exam administrations. I believe that the ExamSoft crisis and MBE content changes account for much of those slumps, but there is little doubt that bar passage rates will remain depressed and continue to fall.
A substantial part of the decline will stem from examinees with very low LSAT scores. Prior studies suggest that students with low scores (especially those with scores below 145) are at high risk of failing the bar. As the number of low-LSAT students increases at law schools, the number (and percentage) of bar failures probably will mount as well.
The impact, however, will not be limited just to those students. As I explained in a previous post, NCBE’s process of equating and scaling the MBE can drag down scores for all examinees when the group as a whole performs poorly. This occurs because the lower overall performance prompts NCBE to “scale down” MBE scores for all test-takers. Think of this as a kind of “reverse halo” effect, although it’s one that depends on mathematical formulas rather than subjective impressions.
State bar examiners, unfortunately, amplify the reverse-halo effect by the way in which they scale essay and MPT answers to MBE scores. I explain this process in a previous post. In brief, the MBE performance of each state’s examinees sets the curve for scoring other portions of the bar exam within that state. If Ohio’s 2015 examinees perform less well on the MBE than the 2013 group did, then the 2015 examinees will get lower essay and MPT scores as well.
The law schools that have admitted high-risk students, in sum, are not the only schools that will suffer lower bar passage rates. The processes of equating and scaling will depress scores for other examinees in the pool. The reductions may be small, but they will be enough to shift examinees near the passing score from one side to another. Test-takers who might have passed the bar in 2013 will not pass in 2015. In addition to taking a harder exam (i.e. a 7-subject MBE), these unfortunate examinees will suffer from the reverse-halo effect describe above.
On the bar exam, the performance of my graduates affects outcomes for your graduates. If my graduates perform less well than in previous years, fewer of your graduates will pass: my graduates are your graduates in this sense. The growing number of low-LSAT students attending Thomas Cooley and other schools will also affect the fate of our graduates. On the bar exam, Cooley’s graduates are our graduates.
Won’t NCBE Fix This?
NCBE should address this problem, but they have shown no signs of doing so. The equating/scaling process used by NCBE assumes that test-takers retain roughly the same proficiency from year to year. That assumption undergirds the equating process. Psychometricians recognize that, as abilities shift, equating becomes less reliable.* The recent decline in LSAT scores suggests that the proficiency of bar examinees will change markedly over the next few years. Under those circumstances, NCBE should not attempt to equate and scale raw scores; doing so risks the type of reverse-halo effect I have described.
The problem is particularly acute with the bar exam because scaling occurs at several points in the process. As proficiency declines, equating and scaling of MBE performance will inappropriately depress those scores. Those scores, in turn, will lower scores on the essay and MPT portions of the exam. The combined effect of these missteps is likely to produce noticeable–and undeserved–declines in scores for examinees who are just as qualified as those who passed the bar in previous years.
Remember that I’m not referring here to graduates who perform well below the passing score. If you believe that the bar exam is a proper measure of entry-level competence, then those test-takers deserve to fail. The problem is that an increased number of unqualified examinees will drag down scores for more able test-takers. Some of those scores will drop enough to push qualified examinees below the passing line.
Looking Ahead
NCBE, unfortunately, has not been responsive on issues related to their equating and scaling processes. It seems unlikely that the organization will address the problem described here. There is no doubt, meanwhile, that entry-level qualifications of law students have declined. If bar passage rates fall, as they almost surely will, it will be easy to blame all of the decline on less able graduates.
This leaves three avenues for concerned educators and policymakers:
1. Continue to press for more transparency and oversight of NCBE. Testing requires confidentiality, but safeguards are essential to protect individual examinees and public trust of the process.
2. Take a tougher stand against law schools with low bar passage rates. As professionals, we already have an obligation to protect aspirants to our ranks. Self interest adds a potent kick to that duty. As you view the qualifications of students matriculating at schools with low bar passage rates, remember: those matriculants will affect your school’s bar passage rate.
3. Push for alternative ways to measure attorney competence. New lawyers need to know basic doctrinal principles, and law schools should teach those principles. A closed-book, multiple-choice exam covering seven broad subject areas, however, is not a good measure of doctrinal knowledge. It is even worse when performance on that exam sets the curve for scores on other, more useful parts of the bar exam (such as the performance tests). And the situation is worse still when a single organization, with little oversight, controls scoring of that crucial multiple-choice exam.
I have some suggestions for how we might restructure the bar exam, but those ideas must wait for another post. For now, remember: On the bar exam, all graduates are your graduates.
* For a recent review of the literature on changing proficiencies, see Sonya Powers & Michael J. Kolen, Evaluating Equating Accuracy and Assumptions for Groups That Differ in Performance, 51 J. Educ. Measurement 39 (2014). A more reader-friendly overview is available in this online chapter (note particularly the statements on p. 274).
More on Grade and Scholarship Quotas
May 5th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
In a response to this post, Michael Simkovic wonders if I believe “it is inherently immoral to limit ‘A’ grades to students whose academic performance is superior to most of their peers, since an ‘A’ is simply a data point and can be replicated and distributed to everyone at zero marginal cost.”
Not at all. I believe in matching grades to performance, and I don’t hesitate to do that–even when the performance is a failing one. Ironically, however, the mandatory grading curve produces results that are quite troubling for those of us who want grades to reflect performance. Constrained by that type of grading system, I have given A’s to students who performed worse than their peers. Let’s consider that problem and then return to the subject of conditional scholarships.
A Tale of Two Tort Classes
To accommodate institutional needs, I once taught two sections of the first-year Torts class. I used the same book and same lecture notes in both classes. We covered the same material in each class, and I drafted a single exam for the group. Following my practice at that time, it was a 4-hour essay exam with several questions.
I graded the exams as a single batch, without separating them into the two sections. Again following my usual practice, I used grading rubrics for each essay. I also rotated batches of essays so that no exam would always suffer (or benefit) from being in the first or last group graded. After I was done, I plotted all of the scores.
I discovered that, if I applied a single curve to both sections, all of the A grades would fall in one section. Our grading rules, however, required me to apply separate curves to each section. So some students in the “smart” section got B’s instead of the A’s they deserved. Some students in the other section got A’s instead of the B’s they deserved. When I discussed my problem with the Associate Dean, he did allow me to use the highest possible curve for the first section, and the lowest possible one for the other section; that ameliorated the problem to some extent. In the end, however, the letter grades did not match performance.
Several other professors have recounted similar experiences to me. It doesn’t happen often, because it is uncommon for a professor to teach two sections of a first-year class. But it does happen. In fact, when professors teach multiple sections of the same course, section differences seem common. If these differences occur when we can readily detect them (by teaching two sections), they probably occur under other circumstances as well.
I don’t think this drawback to mandatory curves rises to the level of immorality. Students understand the system and benefit from some of its facets. The curve forces professors to award similar grades across courses and sections, moderating both curmudgeons and sycophants. As Professor Simkovic notes, the system also restrains creeping grade inflation. A mandatory curve, finally, offers guidance to professors who lack an independent sense of what an A, B, or C exam looks like in their subject.
I tell this story to make clear that a mandatory curve does not necessarily reward achievement. On the contrary, a mandatory curve can give B’s to students “whose academic performance is superior to most of their peers” as measured through blind grading. I know it can happen–I’ve done it.
Commpetition
It feels silly to say this, given my position on deregulating the legal profession, but I do not believe (as Professor Simkovic suggests) that “competition for scarce and valuable resources is inherently immoral.” Competition within an open market usually leads to beneficial results. Competition within a tournament guild, on the other hand, leads to inefficiencies and other harms.
Back to Conditional Scholarships
Returning to our original point of disagreement, I think Professor Simkovic misconstrues college grading patterns–especially in STEM courses. Those courses are not, to my knowledge, graded on a mandatory curve. Instead, the grades correspond to the students’ demonstrated knowledge. The college woman I mention in the primary post was a STEM major; she was no stranger to tough grading. She, however, was accustomed to a field in which her efforts would be rewarded when measured against a rigorous external standard–not one in which only seven students would get an A even if eight performed at that level.
Once again, law school mandatory curves are not “inherently immoral.” They do, however, differ from those that are “routinely used by other educational institutions and state government programs.” Our particular grading practices change the operation of conditional scholarships in law school. At college, a student with a conditional scholarship competes against an external standard. If she reaches that goal, it doesn’t matter how many other students succeed along with her.
In law school, a student’s success depends as much on the efforts of other students as on her own work. If conditional scholarships were in effect when I taught those two sections of Torts, it is quite possible that a student from the “smart section,” who objectively outperformed a student from the “other section,” would have lost her scholarship–while the less able student from the “other section” would have kept her award. I do not think college students understand that perverse relationship between our grading system and conditional scholarships–and neither Professor Simkovic nor Professor Telman has cited any evidence that they do.
Let the Market Rule
As I stated in my previous post, the ABA’s rule has cured two of the ills previously associated with high-forfeiture conditional scholarships. Schools may continue to offer them, subject to that rule. It appears that schools differ widely in the operation of these programs. Some offer only a few conditional scholarships, with rare forfeitures. Others offer a large number, with many forfeitures. Still others lie in between.
The market will soon tell us which of these paths enhance student enrollment. Now that prospective students know more about how conditional scholarships work at law schools, will they continue to enroll at schools with high forfeiture rates? Time will tell.
Hunger Games
May 4th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Professors Michael Simkovic and D.A. Jeremy Telman have both written posts (here and here) praising the use of conditional scholarships for law students. Neither opposes the ABA’s recent rule, which requires greater transparency about forfeiture rates for these scholarships, but neither sees much value in the rule. Telman doubts that disclosure will affect student decisions, while Simkovic suggests that any concern over conditional scholarships was “yet another example of critics applying a double standard to paint law schools in the worst possible light.”
In reaching these conclusions, the posts compare law school conditional scholarships to similar awards at the college level. In the latter context, conditional scholarships promote matriculation, academic achievement, and on-time graduation. Neither writer, however, acknowledges a key distinction between colleges and law schools that administer these awards. At most colleges, conditional scholarships encourage all recipients to succeed. It is possible for all scholarship students to obtain the GPA and credit hours required to maintain the scholarship–and the college hopes that they will.
Some law schools play a very different game with conditional scholarships. These schools impose conditions that, because of mandatory curves in required first-year courses, a significant percentage of recipients will fail to meet. It is mathematically impossible for all scholarship recipients to keep their awards at these schools, and the percentage who will fail is quite predictable to the schools. These are hunger-game scholarships.
How Many Losers?
According to the ABA’s website, 124 law schools awarded conditional scholarships in academic year 2013-14. Eight of those programs were quite small, awarding fewer than 10 conditional scholarships and imposing almost no forfeitures. Sixteen schools, however, showed both a substantial number of conditional scholarships and a forfeiture rate of 50% or higher. At another 26 schools, the forfeiture rate fell between one-third and one-half.
Did these schools do a “poor job predicting which admitted students would excel in law school,” as Telman suggests? Probably not, unless they are perpetually bad at predictions. Forfeiture rates were high at most of these schools in 2011-12 and 2012-13 as well as in 2013-14. The other possibility that Telman suggests seems much more likely: These “law schools were playing a US News game, trying to get higher LSATs into the door without having to offer them three-year scholarships.”
Is there anything wrong with that? I see three problems. Two of them have been alleviated by the ABA rule, but I describe them to underscore the importance of that rule.
Information Asymmetry
The ABA rule addressed a marked information asymmetry between applicants and law schools. As Telman and Simkovic note, many colleges operate conditional scholarship programs and students understand those programs. That, however, was part of the problem. Law school grading is very different from college grading, and many students didn’t understand the difference when they accepted conditional scholarships.
A few years ago, a bright college woman was part of a group of law students I encountered at a coffee shop. The college student was interested in attending law school, and all of us encouraged her ambitions. Then the college student raised a question: “I don’t understand why law school is so competitive,” she asked. “It’s not like there’s a quota on the number of A’s or anything.”
The rest of us inhaled deeply as we prepared to explain the facts of law school life to her. In fact, there is a quota on A’s in first-year (and many upper-level) courses. There’s also a quota on B’s. And because of those quotas, there’s an effective quota on the number of students who will be able to maintain conditional scholarships.
The law schools understand the mathematics of this quite well, but many college students don’t. They are more accustomed to objective grading scales (85% of correct answers merits a B, no matter how many students reach that score) or very loose curves. Even a student who read the Wikipedia entry on law school grading curves, which Telman touts, wouldn’t understand the intersection of the curve with an all-required first year and conditional scholarships. (And shouldn’t a good college education teach them to distrust Wikipedia?)
The ABA rule has greatly reduced this asymmetry. Will it make a difference to prospective students? Professor Telman thinks not, but I disagree. We’ll see how application and matriculation rates work out at schools with the highest scholarship forfeiture rates.
Hidden Agendas
The second defect in conditional scholarship programs is the extent to which they allow schools to claim they are serving students when they are really serving their own interests. The goals cited by Professors Telman and Simkovic (i.e., encouraging students to study hard and to finish their degrees on time) are largely irrelevant in law school. Our students already work hard and finish their degrees on time. Law review membership, academic prizes, and employer preferences provide plenty of motivation for those goals.
If law schools truly wanted to assure hard work in law school, they wouldn’t award conditional scholarships to first-years. Instead, they would save some of their scholarship money to hand out as graduation prizes for the students who earned the highest grades during their final “slack off” semester of law school.
Similarly, if law schools want to encourage students to try law school with little risk, there are better options than high-forfeiture conditional scholarships. We could, for example, award a master’s degree at the end of the first year. The promise of that degree, with its opt-out option, might draw more students to law school than conditional scholarships.
Conditional scholarship programs with high forfeiture rates have one overriding goal: to secure the highest possible revenue for the school, along with the best possible LSAT and UGPA profiles. This is a game in which the odds greatly favor the house and, as long as schools could hide their forfeiture rates, it was unlikely that bettors would properly estimate those odds.
The ABA’s disclosure rule, along with the discussion prompting it, has made clear that many law school conditional scholarship programs exist to benefit schools, not students. When academic institutions engage in self-interested behavior, they should be upfront about those motives–not paper over their goals with proclamations of student interest.
Promoting Competition
My final objection to high-forfeiture conditional scholarships is one that the ABA rule did not cure. These scholarships increase the stress and competitiveness of an already stressful environment. Stress is not something that we should just “get over” or that students should “[wo]man up to.” Stress makes people sick, angry, and prone to substance abuse or mental illness. It can also impair their professional judgment, hurting both clients and lawyers.
I serve on the board of directors of the Ohio Lawyers Assistance Program (OLAP). That’s an organization, similar to ones in most states, that provides confidential assistance to law students or lawyers with alcohol, drug, or mental health problems. The demand for OLAP’s services is high–and we only see the people who realize they have a problem and are willing to seek treatment.
Many aspects of law practice are stressful. Working long hours is stressful. Responding to unbalanced clients is stressful. Losing a dispute is stressful. Unpaid bills are stressful. We don’t need to add to these stresses by increasing the stress level in law school. Contrary to some popular conceptions, increased stress doesn’t improve your ability to handle stress; it just makes you more likely to fall apart.
Helping Ourselves
I see little indication that conditional scholarships help students. The same money distributed evenly among recipients probably would better serve student interests. I’m not sure that these scholarships will even continue to serve law school interests. Law school finished sixth in a recent ranking of graduate degrees, not because our salaries are lower than those in the top five fields but because our stress level is higher. Some very smart people don’t want to waste hours dealing with manufactured stress.
In fact, that college student I mentioned earlier? She decided to take her career ambitions and graduate tuition dollars elsewhere.
Two Hemispheres
May 2nd, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt
More than thirty years ago, John Heinz and Edward Laumann published a pivotal study of the legal profession. Their book, Chicago Lawyers, focused on lawyers working within Chicago’s city limits, but the findings were widely accepted as representative of the profession.
The study’s primary conclusion was simple, but insightful. Heinz and Laumann concluded that a “fundamental distinction” divided lawyers into “two hemispheres.” One group of lawyers “represent[ed] large organizations (corporations, labor unions, or government),” while the other “work[ed] for individuals and small businesses.” The division between these two was so sharp that “[m]ost lawyers reside exclusively in one hemisphere or the other and seldom, if ever, cross the equator.” P. 319.
In addition to highlighting this bifurcation of the legal profession, Heinz and Laumann noted the strong status differences between them. The hemispheres were not equal in status. Instead, lawyers viewed the “organizations” side of the profession as much more prestigious than the “individual” one.
Heinz and Laumann, joined by two other prominent sociologists, repeated their study in 1995. That research, titled Urban Lawyers, concluded that this status difference remained. Indeed, it had grown even sharper. Lawyers viewed securities law as the most prestigious practice area in both 1975 and 1995; divorce law was at or near the bottom in both years. The percentage of lawyers viewing securities law as at least “above average” in prestige, however, grew from 75% to 85% over those two decades. The percentage according that distinction to divorce law shrank from 9% to 4%.
That’s a tremendous gulf.
The Two Hemispheres Today
No one, to my knowledge, has replicated Heinz and Laumann’s study for the most recent generation of lawyers. The After the JD (AJD) project, for example, did not ask subjects about the perceived prestige of practice areas. Every indication, however, suggests that status differences are alive and well in our profession.
In a number of online forums, prospective law students discuss whether particular law schools will secure them BigLaw positions or leave them stranded in “shitlaw.” These are more colorful descriptors than the ones Heinz and Laumann used, but I suspect they reflect a similar categorization of practice fields.
Legal educators often reflect the same attitude–although, again, with more polite language. Even when we note the drawbacks of BigLaw practice, we tend to praise jobs in smaller firms that serve corporate clients. Or we tout public interest work, which employs very few attorneys and is not a realistic option for most law graduates. How many law professors talk enthusiastically about representing divorce clients, workers’ compensation claimants, personal injury plaintiffs, and criminal defendants?
Some of us might say, “but that’s not my field–I can’t praise those practice areas because I’m not familiar with them.” But that’s just as true of the corporate work done by BigLaw firms; many of us don’t teach in those areas either. Yet we can all make appropriate comments about BigLaw jobs, congratulate students on landing those positions, and discuss aspects of that market. Very few of us know what social security lawyers do or how much they earn.
Implications
The existence of these two hemispheres has implications for the profession, the public, and the legal academy. Heinz and Laumann noted one of the effects on the profession. They found that law was a less cohesive profession than other professions like medicine. Lawyers in each hemisphere tended to socialize with one another, rather than with lawyers from the other side of the profession. In addition, the two sides often had conflicting professional goals. Rules that would help one hemisphere often hurt the other.
Heinz and Laumann also speculated that the two hemispheres affected public perceptions of the legal system. The two very different “bars,” they suggested, promoted a public perception that corporations and the government receive a different type of justice than individuals do. This part of their work is speculative–they did not study public perceptions directly–but it is an interesting thought to pursue.
The implications for the legal academy are equally profound. I hope to explore those impacts in a series of posts. Here, though, are a few hints of my views on this:
1. Lawyers working in the two hemispheres may benefit from somewhat different types of education, but the differences are much smaller than many observers believe.
2. Both hemispheres involve mundane, repetitive tasks, as well as intellectually challenging work. Similarly, effective education of “second hemisphere” lawyers is just as intellectually demanding as that for “first hemisphere” ones.
3. Thinking about the needs of second hemisphere clients will help us improve the educational experience for all lawyers. The most important changes we can make in law school, for all clients and lawyers, involve reducing our focus on appellate decision making and enhancing our attention to client interaction. This means much more than adding clinics to the third year; it involves reshaping even parts of the first year.
4. Second-hemisphere law supports just as much scholarship–including interdisciplinary and theoretical work–as first-hemisphere law. Embracing better educational opportunities for lawyers who serve individual clients does not mean abandoning scholarship.
5. Society needs law schools to educate students to serve the second hemisphere. It does not need law schools to educate students for JD advantage jobs.
6. On average, second-hemisphere jobs pay less than first-hemisphere ones. Legal educators have to be candid about this to themselves, applicants, students, and graduates. Law school tuition must take account of these differences, and we can do that without abandoning scholarship.
7. Lawyers, clients, and society would benefit from ending the sharp status lines that mark our profession. I’m not idealistic enough to think we can erase those lines entirely, but we should try to soften them. One way to do that is to reduce the status hierarchies we create within and between our own student bodies.
That’s a healthy agenda, but I’ll try to fulfill it.
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