"Boalt-ing" Opportunity?: Deconstructing Elite Norms in Law School Admissions

Abiel Wong

J.D., Georgetown University Law Center; Class of 1999; B.A., University of Pennsylvania, 1995

The issue of equal opportunity in law school admissions is once again at the forefront of the American scene. In Fall 1997, the first admissions year under the University of California's SP-1 "race-neutral" admissions resolution, minority admissions at Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley's law school, dropped precipitously. In response to this crisis, and in light of prevailing anti-affirmative action sentiment, Abiel Wong argues in "Boalt-ing" Opportunity, Deconstructing Elite Norms in Law School Admissions , that it is imperative to extend the equal opportunity debate beyond the race-conscious constructs of "diversity" and "remedy." Wong argues that by adopting a holistic approach which fundamentally addresses systemic bias within professional selection, law school admissions can be made more inclusive, benefiting law schools, the profession generally, and the society the profession serves.

This Note examines the legal profession as an occupational complex comprised of institutions (the law school), science (jurisprudence), and practitioners, and argues that within this framework, elite lawyers wield significant influence. In particular, lawyers, inculcated with the profession's elite norms, propound pedagogical barriers-to-entry more for the purposes of enhancing prestige, than on the basis of careful analysis of the intellectual demands of law school and professional practice. Within this elite-preferencing framework, "scientific" admissions criteria, such as the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), have taken on roles entirely aside from advancing merit-based, equal opportunity selection. Today, the LSAT operates as the primary index of law schools' selectivity and "ranking," and has fueled a statistical "arms race" (in terms of median LSAT scores of admitted students) premised upon establishing hierarchy in the professional pecking-order, rather than exclusively focusing on quality selection. The unfortunate fall-out from this "inflationary" regime has been the disparate exclusion of qualified applicants from historically disadvantaged groups.

The Note also advances Professor Lawrence's "unconscious racism" paradigm as a complementary construct that inhibits the profession from recognizing admissions' disparate impact as symptomatic of inappropriate bias. Distilled to its essence, this Note argues that only by squarely addressing elite-preferencing selection and unconscious racism, can disparate impact in existing law school admissions be eliminated.

Vol. VI, No. 2, p. 199 (1999)

 

Revised July 17, 2003 (MD)