Latinos blocked out of law school...

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Few Hispanics in law school
editorials and opinion <http://www.scrippsnews.com/taxonomy/term/172>

By LAWRENCE VELVEL
Friday, March 09, 2007

Only an estimated 3.9 percent of this nation's lawyers are Hispanic. It's a group that represents 13 percent of the nation's population, more than 40 million people. Yet, even as this number is rising rapidly, Hispanic enrollment in our nation's law schools is falling off.

There are a number of reasons for this. Some, such as poverty and consequently low graduation rates from high schools and colleges, have little to do with the law schools themselves. But the law schools, and the American Bar Association, are playing a major role in keeping Hispanics out of the legal profession.

Hispanics are being screened out by the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). This test is insisted upon by the ABA, which accredits nearly all law schools today. Yet it has been well established that the LSAT not only discriminates against Hispanics and blacks, but favors applicants from wealthier backgrounds, who score higher than middle- or low-income applicants from any group.

According to Elizabeth Chambliss, a professor at the New York Law School, "The legal profession already is one of the least racially integrated professions in the United States when all four minority groups (African-American, Hispanic, Asian American, Native American) are aggregated."

She blamed "the heavy reliance" of law schools on the LSAT, explaining, "African Americans and other minority groups score lower, on average, than whites, yet law schools' reliance on this measure of aptitude has increased markedly over time."

But even if a Hispanic overcomes the LSAT barrier, he or she runs into tuition barriers. Since 1990 law school tuition has skyrocketed 267 percent. Yale charges tuition of $38,800 a year; the University of Southern California in downtown Los Angeles charges $37,971; Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, charges $31,238, and Texas Southern University, in Houston, charges $20,850.

The result is every one of those schools has a Hispanic enrollment of about 6 percent or fewer, even though most are in large Hispanic centers. USC, located in a huge Latino population center, has only 39 Mexican-American students and 15 other Hispanics enrolled among its 628 full-time students.

At the private University of Miami Law School in Coral Gables, where the annual law school tuition is $31,094, only 11.8 percent of the student body is Hispanic. At nearby, state-supported Florida International University, where tuition is $8,543, Hispanic enrollment is 40.7 percent.

Law school costs and tuitions are being pushed up in good part by the ABA accreditors. "Demanding extravagant wages, working conditions and lifestyles for law professors, and demanding plush facilities and libraries, the ABA standards required enormous financial resources," author Debbie Hagan wrote in her book "Against The Tide," published by University Press of America.

ABA standards regulate everything from how many hours law school professors may teach (not many) to the number of expensive full-time professors, sabbaticals, elaborateness of buildings, entrance examinations and even the number of (very expensive) books in the library, Hagan notes.

It is common for law school professors today to earn between $200,000 and $300,000 a year for light teaching loads, while the students whose tuition pays their salaries graduate with debts of $100,000 or more that take years to pay off.

The Hispanic-excluding ABA rules are nice for law professors, who lead plush lives, but are bad for education.

As Saul Levmore and David Van Zandt of the American Law Deans Association (ALDA) wrote last year: "The ABA continues to impose requirements on the law schools it accredits that are not only extraneous to the process of assuring the quality of legal education, but also that improperly intrude on institutional autonomy in seeking to dictate terms and conditions of employment."

Levmore is president of ALDA and dean of the University of Chicago Law
(Lawrence Velvel is dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. Contact him at velvel(AT)mslaw.edu. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com)

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