The Waning of Racial Preferences at American Law Schools, 2021-2025

Up until now, no one has had much idea of just how, or whether, colleges, universities, and professional schools were complying with the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision prohibiting them from using racial preferences in student admissions.  Using an innovative new data source, we present estimates of the extent of racial preferences at American law schools over the five admissions cycles from 2020-21 through 2024-25.  As a rough generalization, the size of Black preferences used by schools has fallen by about half,  but this varies significantly across schools in ways we analyze.  Hispanic preferences have fallen by a comparable or arguably greater amount.  We also find a good deal of evidence that the diminished scale of law school racial preferences has, somewhat counterintuitively, been a boon for Black and Hispanic students.  Both groups have applied to law schools in substantially increased numbers over the past two admissions cycles, and overall Black and Hispanic enrollments have increased in absolute numbers.  The modest declines in Black enrollment at the more elite law schools, and the small overall decline in the share of 1L seats occupied by Blacks, are counterbalanced by a large decline in the “credential gap” between entering Black students and their classmates, which, we predict, is likely already improving their relative school performance and their prospects for passing the bar and enjoying long-term success in the legal profession

Fostering an Equitable Scrum: A Conceptual Framework for Using Antiracist Enrollment Management Practices to Counter Job Market Discrimination

For most law students, attending law school is an investment. At stake are immense amounts of time and money spent pursuing the degree. The most desired payoff is a lucrative and fulfilling career. This chapter argues that law schools must adopt enrollment management practices that attempt to account for the job market their entering students will face at graduation. In proffering this argument, the chapter presents a conceptual framework for aligning class size targets to the future job market and proposes an equity-based approach to tuition discounting that accounts for job market racism. Graduates of color, particularly Black graduates, experience less favorable job market outcomes than White graduates. These disparities are exacerbated when schools produce more graduates than the job market can absorb. Graduates of color also tend to pay more for law school, due to lower odds of receiving tuition discounts. Enrollment managers can help reduce the harmful impacts of these realities by rooting enrollment management practices, including class size targets and discounting strategies, in equity and systemic antiracism

Backlash: How Racial Justice in Higher Education Is Being Trumped by Politics

This article discusses contemporary social and political backlash to racial justice and how it has overshadowed and flouted higher education antidiscrimination law and principles of racial justice. The first three parts chart the evolution of U.S. Supreme Court precedent in higher education affirmative action cases. Part I interrogates the Court’s fallacious detachment of affirmative action from its racial justice origins in Defunis and Bakke. Part II discusses how the Grutter majority tacitly departed from Bakke, using the vague concept of critical mass to seemingly empower schools to engage in affirmative action as a racial justice tool. Part III explains how Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) gave shine to a less extreme, but nonetheless specious, cousin of colorblindness that I term color-neutrality. This posture, while a clear victory for affirmative action antagonists, nonetheless preserved a narrow path for schools to consider applicant race, even with racial justice intentions. The concluding parts of the article address the societal hostilities to racial justice and their impacts on higher education. Part IV explains how increasingly dim attitudes towards the Black Lives Matter movement and the normalizing of caustic rhetoric by first-time candidate Donald Trump seeded contemporary malcontent. Part V details how political elites have instigated and validated the resulting backlash through messaging that relies heavily on willful mischaracterizations of SFFA and policymaking that relies heavily on suppressing certain speech and aspersing certain ideas. Lastly, Part VI uses law school enrollment data to illustrate how the backlash is narrowing pathways of opportunity, particularly for Black aspiring lawyers

ABA Profile of the Legal Profession

The Profile of the Legal Profession is a compilation of statistics and trends about lawyers, judges and law students, gathered from the ABA’s National Lawyer Population Survey, the federal government and nonprofit organizations

Mistaken about Mistakes: Error Analysis as an Untapped Tool for Law School Success

Mistakes: everyone makes them, perhaps the new law student more than most. But why do our students continue to make the same errors despite our concerted efforts to prevent them? This article explores this question and provides ideas on how to utilize mistakes to fuel the learning process. Science has proven that the human brain is hardwired to benefit from errors. However, the psychological effects of failing, cultural systems, and the American educational system are frequent barriers to this biological process. To overcome these obstacles and most effectively employ error analysis, I propose a three-step model. First, professors must lay a foundation of psychological safety for students who make mistakes by fostering healthy attitudes and mindsets towards failure. Second, legal educators need to deliberately elicit several specific types of errors instead of waiting for them to occur naturally. Third, instructors must provide carefully crafted feedback in an interactive setting. This article further provides examples and recommendations of what these three steps should look like in the law school classroom

Licensure as Pathway, Not Barrier

Connecticut stands at a pivotal moment in addressing its access to justice crisis. Despite enacting a landmark civil right to counsel for tenants facing eviction, the state struggles to meet demand due to a shrinking attorney population and declining bar passage rates. This article argues that Connecticut should pair its Right to Counsel program (CT-RTC) with a supervised practice pathway to attorney licensure. Such a pathway would allow law graduates to demonstrate competence through structured coursework, supervised legal service, and portfolio assessment—offering a more equitable and practice-ready alternative to the traditional bar exam. Drawing on successful models from Oregon and national recommendations like the Lawyers’ Justice Corps, the proposed CT-RTC pathway would help stabilize and expand eviction defense services while creating a licensure route aligned with public service. The article contends that this approach would not only strengthen CT-RTC’s implementation but also diversify the legal profession and better protect the public. By leveraging its existing civil Gideon framework, Connecticut has a unique opportunity to lead national licensure reform. A pilot program linking supervised practice to licensure in eviction defense could serve as a scalable model for other public interest areas, ensuring that legal representation is both accessible and reflective of the profession’s evolving needs

Teaching Legal Analysis Through the Lens of Second Language Pedagogy: A Consciousness-Raising Approach

Even though law professors are not ostensibly language instructors, we are teaching our students how to use a specialized form of language. Law students learn new terminology, discourse structures, analytic frameworks, and pragmatic conventions for communicating with each other, their professors, and other legal professionals. By virtue of being in law school, students undergo a process of “language socialization” and develop culturally appropriate ways of communicating through the myriad spoken and written interactions they have with more proficient members of the legal discourse community. If law students are learning a new language (of sorts), it follows that language teaching methodology can guide how we teach them, and especially how we teach the skills that underlie legal reading, writing, and analysis. The premise of this article is that law faculty can successfully borrow methods and approaches from language pedagogy, as informed by research in second language acquisition (SLA), a vibrant area of linguistics dedicated to the study of how people learn a second language. One common approach to second language instruction is consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising enables students to learn language rules by solving problems about language, often in pairs or small groups. Consciousness-raising tasks might ask students to fill in the gaps of an incomplete text with a word or phrase, place jumbled sentences in order, or evaluate the appropriateness of a word or sentence within a paragraph. Consciousness-raising is a form of guided “discovery learning” that is not unique to the language teaching context; however, it is especially well-suited to second language learning. Research suggests that students who solve language problems are more actively engaged in the learning process, which can promote a deeper understanding of the target language. In addition, because language problem-solving tasks require students to communicate with each other using the very language which they must also learn, language acquisition is doubly enhanced

Visible Learning: Adapting Primary and Secondary Pedagogical Approaches to Legal Education

Students of Generation Z bring a unique set of characteristics, values, and expectations to legal education. The “norm” this generation experienced as children was fundamentally different from that of anyone before them—a digital world that operated at speed, scale, and scope. This cohort of students grew up learning in elementary schools with web-based tools and learning management systems, simulations, and other online methods. At an early age, they developed an early facility with digital tools that allowed them to be self-reliant, pragmatic, and highly collaborative. This generation has also been able to access peers, trends, and news from all over the world—developing a greater appreciation for diversity and finding their own unique identities. Like their predecessors, Generation Z students arrive at law school with diverse life, professional, and academic experiences, as well as varied learning strategies. Recognizing that “learning is not a one-size-fits-all experience,” many legal educators are willing to adapt their teaching methods to maximize student outcomes. In other words, dedicated professors are deeply invested in their students’ success. As we welcome students of Generation Z into our law school classrooms, could gaining an understanding of their prior educational experiences provide us with additional insights? Could examining how our students have previously learned help us better strategize and inform our pedagogical approaches moving forward? In this Article, I argue that law professors can draw inspiration from pedagogical approaches in primary and secondary education to increase law student outcomes and promote successful learning. In Part II, I describe Visible Learning, an instructional approach which has had a significant impact on K-12 classroom practices today. In Part III, I explore ways in which teaching is unclear and how Visible Learning can help law professors overcome clarity problems to improve learning. Lastly, in Part IV, I propose a conceptual framework which situates Visible Learning within the context of legal pedagogy and provide several examples law professors can use to adapt to their law classrooms

Breaking Down Bar Passage: Examining the Predictive Utility of Academic Performance and Student Characteristics on Subscale Scores of the Uniform Bar Exam—A Follow-Up Study

Building on a prior study by Farley et al. (2019), this study examines the predictive utility of academic performance and student characteristics on the subcomponents of the Ohio Bar Exam—the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE), Written Essay, and Multistate Performance Test (MPT)—and situates findings within the context of the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE). Results support the notion that in-law school factors, such as cumulative GPA and upper-level bar coursework, are more predictive of first-time bar passage than pre-law school credentials or demographics alone, but statistical models struggled to identify clear predictive patterns between experiential coursework and MPT performance—highlighting the need for additional research on the MPT specifically. Overall, findings underscore the timeliness of the newly developed 2026 NextGen Bar Exam, while making a conceptual contribution to bar passage research and providing valuable insights for legal education, policy, and practice

An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Student-Faculty Demographics on Law School Graduate Attrition, Attrition Rates, J.D.s Awarded, and Bar Passage

This paper seeks to delve into one of legal education\u27s most critical yet scarcely explored questions: How does the interplay between student and faculty demographics impact law students\u27 sense of belonging and, in turn, their rates of attrition, the earning of Juris Doctor degrees, and their success on the bar exam The necessity for this exploration is highlighted by enduring disparities in bar passage rates and the continual underrepresentation of women and minorities within the legal profession. Despite a growing emphasis on the alienation experienced by women and minority students in law schools and its effects on their graduation rates, a significant understanding gap remains regarding the potential for faculty-student demographic congruence—or its absence—to either mitigate or exacerbate these challenges. Through a detailed empirical examination, this research aims to make a vital contribution to the conversation on enhancing inclusivity and equity in legal education. It seeks to enrich the ongoing dialogue around legal education reform and to underscore the critical role that faculty diversity plays in creating a more inclusive and supportive environment for all law students