The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has issued a report on racial preferences in law schools; the link above has links to the report and some excellent commentary. Drawing on the work of UCLA Prof. Richard Sander, it finds that racial preferences for blacks actually reduce the number of blacks who become lawyers. How? Well, start off with the fact that a relatively small percentage of blacks have high LSAT scores. Those scores turn out to be highly predictive of success at becoming a lawyer. The most selective law schools, employing racial preferences, take care to admit something like 5 to 10 percent of black applicants, in an attempt to approximate in their student body the black proportion of the population (which is 12 percent). That means that most black law students at that school come in with significantly lower LSAT scores than nonblack students.





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