Sander
Richard Sander’s Assault on Affirmative Action Rooted in Questionable Data
In a controversial empirical critique of law school affirmative action in the January, 2005 Stanford Law Review, UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander analyzes national law school admissions, grades, and bar exam data, and comes to the provocative conclusion that because African Americans are “mismatched” at law schools where they are set up to fail, ending affirmative action at ABA-accredited law schools would actually increase the number of African American attorneys by 8%.
In November 2007, EJS helped lead a coalition effort to stop Sander and his co-investigators from exposing the confidential data of applicants for admission to the State Bar between 1997 and 2005. Sander requested that the State Bar provide him with a wealth of information, including applicants’ race, gender, ethnicity, bar examination scores, LSAT scores, law school GPAs and grades, and undergraduate GPAs and grades.
In 2005, Bill Kidder (then an EJS research associate) co-authored with David Chambers and Rick Lempert of the University of Michigan Law School and Tim Clydesdale of the College of New Jersey a critique of Sander. “The data show that Sander’s questionable statistical methods cause him to seriously underestimate the harm of ending affirmative action, and to substantially overestimate the beneficial performance changes likely to occur without affirmative action,” Kidder explains. “A more plausible estimate is that ending affirmative action would currently eliminate about one-quarter of African American lawyers, and would essentially resegregate elite law schools and leadership opportunities within the legal profession.”