PANEL: LSAT, U.S. NEWS AND MINORITY ADMISSIONS

St. John's Law Review, Winter 2006 by Austin, Janice L

Since then, every year when I return to the New York City LSAC Forum, I wonder if he achieved his goal. Did a top ten law school admit the young African-American man with the 143 LSAT? Bingo, there it is! That darn intersection of the LSAT, law school rankings, and the minority applicant.

So what happens when an admissions committee considers applications from a minority candidate? First, a school may be agonizing as it attempts to answers the questions: "Who is a minority applicant?" and "What does it mean to be a minority in our pool?" I would suggest that the answers are probably as varied as the number of AALS accredited law schools. These questions are asked and often answered in silence, only left to reverberate in the minds of each admissions committee member. Is it just too risky to honestly discuss race in an admissions committee meeting? I think we all would agree that a legal education affords the recipient a seemingly limitless path to power and wealth. Of course, membership to this privileged segment of our society should be available to those who can demonstrate their qualifications in a tightly scripted gauntlet.

Today, one of the key qualifiers for an acceptance letter from a law school is the LSAT-the Law School Admissions Test-or as I might dub it, the "Law School Access Test."

As you begin to slice the LSAT performance pie, there continues to be one racial group whose slice is a tad smaller than the rest, resulting in a wider disparity in acceptance rates. Thus, as a group, African-Americans are more likely than any other racial or ethnic minority group to be unsuccessful in a process that places a premium on high LSAT scores. Translated, this means to me that in the near-term, unless schools demonstrate a willingness to buck the trend and enroll students who possess a wider range of LSAT scores, they may find their entering classes, at worst, void of African-Americans or perhaps, at best, enrolling some majority of black students whose ancestral roots extend beyond places like Compton, East Oakland, the Bronx, or even my hometown of Newark, New Jersey.

Back to the admissions committee meeting, consider the following hypothetical, which I believe is more of a reality at most schools. Say Law School X is reported as a third tier law school by U.S. News. In addition to wanting to "move up in the rankings," the school is deeply committed to improving its historically low enrollment of ethnic minorities, especially African-Americans. Thanks in part to a unique confluence of traits, Law School X has done a terrific job at improving the volume and credentials of its applicant pool.2 However, only a small fraction of the pool identify themselves as ethnic minorities, and even fewer as African-American. All of the African-American applicants have LSAT scores that are far below the target range Law School X believes will provide some of the upward thrust of improved U.S. News rankings. How might this hypothetical be discussed in the admissions committee meeting?