Power and Class in the Practice of Law

James McWhorter has another characteristically excellent post in which he examines the firing of a law professor on grounds of racism:

Systemic racism does affect how well all but a very few black students are prepared to excel in top-ranked law schools. Why would it not, given black people’s history in this country? Not to mention racist white teachers, in the wake of desegregation of public schools, alienating black students in the 1960s to the point that in synergy with the new Black Power ideology, a new element was introduced into black culture of seeing nerdiness – i.e. what you need to do well in law school – as “white.” The effects of this could be subtle – an invaluable study showed black fifth graders more likely to say homework was for the teacher while white ones were more likely to say it was for their parents – but powerful.

However, our culture of racial preferences requires that top law schools admit most black students under different standards of grades and LSAT scores, out of quest for a proper amount of diversity in the school. Some will insist that this isn’t true, but it has been resoundingly proven time and again, such as in the Grutter v. Bollinger decision where it was allowed that the University of Michigan law school admit black students according to “holistic” evaluation that included a point bonus for skin color.

pointing out an uncomfortable truth:

Richard Sander argued in 2004 that when black law students were instead admitted to schools where all students had the same general level of dossier, they perform at a higher level, were much more likely to graduate, and were 50% less likely to fail the bar exam. In such schools, comments like Sellers’ and Wax’s are vastly less likely.

This study was later paralleled by studies such as that by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, with Esteban Ausejo and Joseph Hotz, showing that the “mismatch” of black students to schools actually decreased the number of black students who chose and stuck with majors in STEM subjects.

I want to make two observations. The first is that the attack on the law prof wasn’t about racism or equity or justice or reason or producing the best lawyers or more black lawyers graduating. It was about power. Those leveling the attacks wanted the power they perceived law professors as having to wield it themselves.

Second, focus only on the practice of law. There is a class system in the practice of law. Incomes in the practice of law occur in a bimodal distribution. I’ve posted on this before. A “bimodal distribution” is sort of like a Bactrian camel’s humps—like two Gaussian distributions jammed together. Graduates of top law schools are in the right hand side higher income hump while all other law school grads are in the left hand side, lower income hump. Talking about median or average incomes among lawyers is meaningless noise because there are actually two average and two medians. IIRC the left hand hump median income is around $35,000 a year while the median income in the right hand hump is around $200,000.

There is a similar class system among MBAs but not among med school graduates or, to the best of my knowledge, among engineers.

Consequently, law schools present a special problem. If the objective is to become rich as a lawyer, while not impossible it will be very, very difficult to achieve unless you attend and graduate from a top law school. Many of the individuals who attend law schools that aren’t in that right hand hump find it difficult to pay off the loans they took out to go to law school. All of this by way of saying that suggesting that black students attend schools other than the top 15 or 20 is no solution to a graver problem in the practice of law.