The Supreme Court’s decision in June to no longer allow race-conscious admissions practices in higher education is expected to force law schools to move away from relying on LSAT scores and instead look more holistically at applicants.
“We can expect to see a lot of educational institutions drop objective standards from their admissions practices,” John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This allows them to continue race-conscious admissions by other means. Already, we see schools embracing this workaround.”
The Supreme Court ruled that admissions policies at Harvard University and University of North Carolina that took into account an applicant’s race violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Applicants may talk about race in their personal statements, but schools cannot make admissions decisions based on race.
Sailer said law schools will need to be less dependent on such concrete metrics as the LSAT or risk gutting diversity.
Law school leaders said schools will need to step up efforts to recruit and enroll minority students and to place more emphasis on evaluating each applicant’s life experiences.
“The Supreme Court made it harder; it didn’t make it impossible,” said Timothy Lynch, vice president and general counsel for University of Michigan, during a recent Association of American Law Schools conference. “So that means we all have to work harder, and that is just one of the challenges in life.”
For several years, law schools in California and Michigan have been banned from using race as a factor. Law schools in other states will need to adapt quickly or face lawsuits.
The Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSAT, said schools can use questions that are already in the council’s standard application that many schools use. They include:
• Are or were you a first-generation college/university student?
• Will you be a first-generation law student?
• Since starting college, have you ever participated in a pre-law program designed for individuals underrepresented in the field of law (such as a pipeline program)? Enter name of program(s).
• When enrolled in college, were you a Pell Grant recipient in any semester?
But critics have already warned law schools that they will get sued if they “develop an admissions scheme through pretext or proxy to achieve the same discriminatory outcome.”[p1]
“Today, we sent a warning letter to the deans of 200 law schools around America, telling them that they must obey the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down illegal racial discrimination and affirmative action,” said Stephen Miller, president of America First Legal and a former adviser to former President Donald Trump. “If they try to violate, circumvent, bypass, subvert or otherwise program around that ruling, we are going to take them to court. We are going to hold them to account.”
In the letter, Miller said schools must “announce the termination of all forms of race, national origin and sex preferences in student admissions, faculty hiring and law-review membership or article selection. And you must, before the start of the next academic school year, announce an official policy that prohibits all components of the law school from giving preferential treatment to anyone because of that individual’s race, national origin or sex.”
