If the argument that diversity is good because of the exposing of students to differing viewpoints, wouldn’t students be better off if a law school went out and used affirmative action to recruit a Hasid, a Sri Lankan, a Macedonian, an Argentinian, a Mennonite, a Latvian, a Roma, a Gujarati Hindu, a Tibetan Buddhist, and a North Korean refugee? That surely does much more to increase the number of viewpoints available to students than disregarding African-American LSAT scores in admissions.
University of North Carolina School of Law professor Charles Daye
The National Law Journal headline is “Research attests to the value of diversity at law schools,” and that’s certainly how study authors Charles Daye et al. pitch their piece. But they simply demonstrate shoddy science to reach the authors’ predetermined conclusions.
The study relied on self-reporting of law students, and found that “Many students reported that they left law school with a deeper understanding of the law as a result of diversity among their classmates.” Thus, the authors argue diversity should matter in admissions.
The non sequitur is astonishing. All we conclude is that students think that diversity helps their understanding of the law. In the absence of controls (or even a quantifiable statistic for “understanding of the law”), the most we can conclude is that students want to seem politically correct when talking to interviewers.
Even if we were to accept the conclusions of the paper, the policy conclusions—there’s a benefit to race discrimination in the name of diversity—do not follow.
Leave aside the constitutional question whether these unquantifiable diversity benefits survive strict scrutiny. How much diversity is required? If every law school abolished diversity-based race discrimination (so that schools that refused to participate in the race-based race wouldn’t lose qualified students to better-ranked law schools that reach down to inflate their non-Asian minority population), would the resulting percentages of non-Asian minorities be sufficient to inculcate students with the benefits of diversity? If so, why need affirmative action at all?
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