Bar lowered way too far for minorities at law school

Indianapolis Star ^ | 12-27-02 | Robert Heidt

[Teacher317]

By implication, the legal challenge to race discrimination in admissions at the Michigan Law School now before the Supreme Court of the United States also challenges the race discrimination in admissions at the Indiana University Law School in Bloomington.

As at Ann Arbor, we at Bloomington enforce a de facto quota of the minimum number of blacks and other minorities we are determined to enroll in each first-year law school class. And as at Ann Arbor, we engineer our admissions process to guarantee that when the first-year class shows up in late August, our de facto quota will once again be met.

[Teacher317]

THIS guy deserves some encouragement... I can only imagine the response he's getting at ultra-liberal IU-Bloomington

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[Pearls Before Swine]

Note to self: be very circumspect in hiring minority lawyers who graduated from IU Bloomington.

[Alberta's Child]

Maybe he ought to start a completely different campaign . . .

The quota for minority admissions at this law school ought to be raised to 100%. It doesn't take much skill or intelligence to be a lawyer, and nobody likes lawyers anyway.

With 48 hours there will be no more affirmative action policy at the University of Indiana law school.

[Blood of Tyrants]

What is the failure rate of the AA students vs. the students who had to get in on their merits?

[Marauder]

There are other red flags: if he or she advertises on TV they should be carefully watched, for example personal injury lawyers. It's not hard to discern their target market.
Best approach is to retain one that has been certified in whatever service you need, for example "Family Practice." The "bar" has been lowered too far for all of them.
Before some of you lawyer freepers light your blowtorches, I realize that there are many above board and ethical attorneys out there. But you have to admit there are some slimy shysters as well. Perfect example is the scum-sucking pig that defended Westerfield, the murderer of Danielle Van Damm in California.

[lady lawyer]

The affirmative action admittees at my law school uniformly had trouble passing classes and/or passing the bar. If they did pass the bar, their practice was noticeably poor. But minority clients, unaware of that fact, flocked to them.

In the end, affirmative action hurts minorities. Minority clients who go to AA lawyers are not as well-served as they would have been absent AA.

Minority lawyers who make it on their merits are nevertheless tarred by the suspicion that they may have been admitted with less than adequate qualifications. Heck, I felt that suspicion as a woman, because it was well-known that my law school gave an extra boost to female applicants. Until first semester grades came out, my male classmates assumed that I and my female classmates had benefited from affirmative action. Who could blame them?

[Myrddin]

What is the failure rate of the AA students vs. the students who had to get in on their merits?

The record at UCSD was 83% failure for the 5% that were admitted using lowered AA standards.

[Teacher317]

Fail? What's that? Virtually nobody fails at IU Law School. The grade curve for every class is mandated. Generally, it is somewhere around 15% A, 45% A- to B, 35% B- to C+, and 5% C and below, and the overall class GPA must also be between 2.9 and 3.05 (on a 4.0 scale). Students must maintain a C+ average... so unless you're in the bottom 5% of all of your classes, you don't get dumped for grades.

The dropout rate, however, is a different story. I don't know what it is for IU Law, but IIRC, somewhere (the Michigan Law School case?) they cited that an AA student was 80% more likely to drop out than a non-AA student.

The author mentions some statistical compilings he was doing for the Indiana Policy folk... maybe we can find that somewhere?

[B-bone]

As a result, black applicants whose low grades, LSAT scores and extracurricular record would otherwise win admission only to Howard Law School in Washington, D.C., regularly win admission from us.

He doesn't speak highly of Howard students either.

[Henrietta]

Ping

[Henrietta]

"Perfect example is the scum-sucking pig that defended Westerfield, the murderer of Danielle Van Damm in California."

Without people to defend the accused, our justice system would fail to operate. The guy had a job to do, and he did it, so don't be too hard on him.

[Henrietta]

One of the stupidest, most loud-mouthed, racist black women in my law school class had the gall to insist that white women were the major beneficiaries of affirmative action. I'm not aware that I've ever earned anything but by merit in my entire life, and I know for a fact that my law school gave no extra "points" for white girls.

[CatoRenasci]

Although it was 20+ years ago, when I was at UCLA Law School, the difference in the bar passage rates of regular students and minority students was large: IIRC it was 94% first time pass for 'regular admit' students, around 60% first time pass for blacks and around 50% first time pass for hispanics, giving the school as a hole an 85+% first time pass rate.

UCLA's Law Review was entirely write-on, but their were NO minority students on Law Review (let alone editors) while I was at UCLA, unless you count a couple of Asians.

With only a couple of notable exceptions, the minority students in my law school class were barely able to do the work, even with extensive tutoring and mentoring from other students and faculty.

[WL-law]

Note to self: be very circumspect in hiring minority lawyers who graduated from IU Bloomington.

Well, with low graduation/high dropout-flunkout rates, followed by low bar-passing percentages, the system does have some tools to protect itself and consumers.

But the non-minority applicant that was DENIED admission remains denied -- they get little solace from the protections I mentioned.

[exmoor]

WELL JUDGE HE ONLY STABBED THE ONCE, SO SET HIM FREE....Victim-Offender Mediation Programs (VOMP), also known as Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORP) bring offenders face-to-face with the victims of their crimes with the assistance of a trained mediator, usually a community volunteer. Crime is personalized as offenders learn the human consequences of their actions, and victims (who are largely ignored by the criminal justice system) have the opportunity to speak their minds and their feelings to the one who most ought to hear them, contributing to the healing process of the victim.

[WL-law]

Posted before I read your replies -- well, looks like we all had the same experience!

[OldFriend]

What in the world can minorities be thinking when they demand the standards be lowered because they can't measure up.

How demeaning to them and how racist of their liberal supporters who think nothing of this solution to not meeting those standards.

[WL-law]

Especially recall those painful first-year classes where an affirm action student finally hit the day where he/she had to be the primary responder, i.e., state the facts of the day's cases and then take on the professor's socratic interrogation regarding the legal principles. In my school no other student was allowed to "help", and for the unprepared or unqualified there was nowhere to hide. Some scarring experiences ....

[Atlas Sneezed]

"Note to self: be very circumspect in hiring minority lawyers who graduated from IU Bloomington."

The sad truth is that rational people can apply this to any professional (e.g. Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer) who is assumed to have benefited from race preferences in education and hiring. Without AA, we might have fewer dark-skinned professionals, but at least we would know that they met the same qualifications as everyone else.

If one considers preferring to avoid a black doctor or lawyer "racist," then we may conclude that AA TEACHES racism.