Harvard Law cutting its number of affirmative action of slots for blacks is getting a lot of publicity, but most other top law schools ignored the Supreme Court's ruling.
Since there are limits for the high and low scores, one should assume a triangular distribution instead of a normal distribution to avoid having one's assumption predict scores that are impossible to achieve.
The three graphs at the article's end display both kurtosis and truncation, as you predicted. However, the "2020-2022 US & Canadian Applicants' Highest Score" curve is quite Gaussian in appearance up to a score of ~175 (~98%; ~2.5 deviations above the mean).
An unrelated but interesting observation:
"Law schools report percentiles not averages to the USNews
Assume a school has an accepted student profile that equates to an entering class 25th percentile LSAT score of 170. In front of the admissions committee are two candidates [competing for one position], one with a top LSAT score of 120 and one with a top LSAT score of 169. [Either student can be selected without having] any effect on the school’s LSAT profile."
It looks like the total number of black law students went up. Did more apply as a reaction to the SCOTUS case, or is it an Up Yours by the schools? Any white student who really wanted to go to a top school but was rejected is probably fine with it, but maybe some Asian rejects will try to rake in some cash, if they're patient enough.
It must be mortifying to go to a grad school where you're so far out of your league. Undergrad, you're usually not so obvious.
Since the LSAT remains only one of several factors in determining admission it should not surprise us that black applicants continue to be admitted at a higher rate than their LSAT performance alone would predict. Black applicants to elite law schools quite obviously have superior personalities when compared to asians or white folk. How could we explain the genius and popularity of rap music if that were not so?
Are you sure? I have very little knowledge of the business of law, but in other fields people are far more swayed by confidence than competence. Seems to me incompetence in contract law would show up much later, if and when something went wrong.
OTOH, maybe the partners oversee the associates closely enough to detect it and do frequent weeding.
It's a good analogy. I am a good programmer and have read a lot of contracts over the years, and the similarities are many. Law has a language, and if you mess up the syntax you will have problems. Large programs or contracts are broken up into sections, objects, methods, etc. and a good lawyer and a good programmer know the value of reusing code that has been proven to work. Of course you don't get to 'run' your contract until someone sues you or you sue the other party, so they are much harder to debug.
I had a software idea that I never (yet) pursued, which was to make an IDE (integrated development environment) for law, take advantage of the code quality and reuse that programmers have figured out over the decades. I didn't think I was anywhere deep enough on law to attempt it, though I had some ideas.
It's now also interesting to think about the uses of generative AI in contract law. It seems like an obvious fit, given that genAI is (very broadly speaking) a mashup between coding and writing.
Does anyone know to what degree law firms are trusting genAI to draft contracts? And, assuming they're using it -- which seems likely, since it has the potential to save so very much time and money -- do they insist every contract be read end to end to ensure it doesn't have any hallucinations?
I appreciate that your comment is sarcastic, but I'll clarify for any less knowledgeable readers:
LSAT scores are by far the most important factor in law school admissions, followed by undergraduate GPA and underrepresented minority (URM) status. (See Mike Spivey's admissions bible for details.)
One interesting thing about law school admissions is that your numerical GPA is generally more important than the prestige/rigor of your undergraduate school. A 4.00 in communications from Midwestern State U is arguably better than a 3.5 in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard for your admissions chances. The reason being that undergrad GPA average is factored into USNWR rankings, which 99% of law schools are obsessed with.
So far, all that the 2024 Supreme Court crackdown on Affirmative Action has accomplished is two lost Republican Congressional seats in Alabama and Louisiana, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh's cover for supporting the Affirmative Action crackdown that was ignored anyway.
For the law schools with median-LSAT scores in the 170s, the student body is drawn overwhelmingly from the IQ125 to IQ140 range.
(Straight-line conversion: LSAT170 = IQ around the mid-130s; the Reddit r/cognitivetesting people put it at IQ133; IQ-blogger PumpkinPerson has put it several points higher; with the caveat that all these scores are probably, in aggregate, subject to good-tester bias and preparation bias at the top end, and "actual IQ" may tend to be moderately lower. In other words, these are percentile conversions and the population looked at is at the very tip-top of the pyramid, so it's top-heavy with over-performers and not balanced-out by any sort of underperformers, as you quite-fast run out of people once the IQ140 range starts.)
Yale's reported median of LSAT175 would be around IQ140. Mathematically, Blacks "should" be around 0.35% of slots at Yale Law School. That from a hypothetical randomly-selected group of IQ140 Americans. That would put a given year-cohort at Yale Law at 0 or 1 Black most of the time.
Their actual level of 12.2% of Yale Law in 2024 overrepresents Blacks by about 35x (mathematical: 0.35%; actual: 12.2%). That kind of racial-favoritism is consistent with our "regime" and its goals.
But since the precedent of disparate impact assumes that people will be represented in the same proportion as their population in the applicant pool, maybe the people who sue cannot use this math to prove their point. If not they would have to go through discovery and find shenanigans. I didn't read the Harvard case, but maybe to law professors it serves as a guide to hide shenanigans.
Hi Steve - I think you transposed New York Law School and New York University. I'm pretty sure NYU is one of the "14" and not the nearby NYLS (with LSAT average of 152).
This is probably not relevant but here in Colorado personal injury lawyers (at least the one that advertise on the TV) are either white or Hispanic. We have the "Strong Arm of the Law" and "Win Big with " [add last name]. Seems to be more than enough work to go around.
A generation ago, East Texas and Louisiana had some hot shot black personal injury lawyers. The WSJ was always reporting on their latest outrageous antics in front of sympathetic juries.
Don't be so sure. I once attended a CLE seminar headlined by a lawyer who specialized in attorney divorces. He said that he saw a lot of ltax returns showing income of 40k.
The most striking numbers in the chart above suggest that aspiring black lawyers have recognized that it just might be easier to go to historically black law schools. Notice that almost all of the biggest increases in black admissions went to HBCUs.
I presume that your third year at an HBCU is spent in prepping to pass the bar exam while at Yale you are instead invited to contemplate the thisness of that and the like for your last year because of course you'll pass the bar exam.
Just a general comment - documenting absolute 2023 to 2024 admission changes Table 1 in percent is a little bit "misleading". Absolute changes are redundant because everyone with IQ>90 will be able to calculate them on his/her own. Relative changes are more interesting, since not everyone does mental high-speed fractions and for lack of a calculator, lol. Actually, I was surprized my new smartphone didn't have one preinstalled! Times fly! Anyway, Harvard saw a 55% relative reduction in numbers - biggest among the peers. Obviously, the effect was drowned by other Ivy League members - Stanford had an almost 2-fold increase. Sounds like a case of whack a mole...
It's unfortunate, but "So sue me" is a bigger part of the law than people realize.
With respect to the business of law, you can go a long way being an asocial nerd but partnership is where they start sorting between the legal technicians and the law firm's business owners. Law firms like confident, smart, likeable people in the partnership because that's who their clients want sweeping into the conference room and demonstrating a quick, comprehensive understanding of the industry and the client's needs.
This is the backstory to "lawyers" like Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama. They really don't understand either law or business. So the firm scrambles to land them in these frivolous late-stage democracy jobs where all they have to do is stand there, have tits and be black.
Did you ever read <i>The Good Black</i>? It's about a HLS grad who won a race discrimination verdict, in D.C. against a firm that denied him partnership, only to have it reversed on appeal. I found the factual background to be fascinating.
He began his career at the Houston office of bankruptcy powerhouse Weil Gotshal. After 4 years they told him he wouldn't make partner because he didn't work hard enough, an assessment with which he agreed. They kept him on salary for a year while he looked for a new spot. He landed at the tiny D.C. office (about 10 lawyers) of a big Chicago firm, which he says promised to make him a partner down the road. At this small outpost, The Good Black practiced insurance insolvency, an exceedingly narrow and not very lucrative corner of the law.
The billings of the D.C. office overwhelming came from a star insurance litigator, famous for his treatise on demonstrative evidence. But that guy left, because his property/casualty clients didn't want to pay big firm rates. This departure caused Chicago to close their D.C. office, at which point The Good Black moved to Chicago, where he didn't know anyone, and announced, "okay I'm here, time to make me a partner," and they said dream on. How anyone thought these facts added up to a discrimination claim I'll never know.
The author of the book is a white HLS classmate of The Good Black.
Just a random scroll through produced two examples that surprised me: Liberty University nearly doubled its share of black admits from 4% and change to 8% and change, and Indiana University its low and probably quite honest 3% rate down to 1%. Seems sort of surprising as a state school in a typical prog college town/faculty/staff.
I thought Heather Mac Donald had some stat’s wrt CA law schools in her book, “The Diversity Delusion”. The stat’s pointing to lower admission standards via LSAT producing lower quality graduates—as per class standing. I don’t see where the top Ivy’s would be much different in result, albeit they’d get the pick of the “best” minorities, but that number is a limited pool to be sure. The ultimate result we are now seeing to mask this result is the attempt to remove/moderate State bar exams, which minority graduates have an especially difficult time passing. My particular fear is that lower qualified student in *any* program of studies necessitate a lowering of standards within that program, hence producing less qualified graduates—minority or otherwise. Seen this is my department.
When has Yale Law School ever considered the law as other than something to be gamed?
Since there are limits for the high and low scores, one should assume a triangular distribution instead of a normal distribution to avoid having one's assumption predict scores that are impossible to achieve.
Here is a link to the most informative article on the subject that a quick search uncovered.
https://www.lsd.law/articles/LSAT-score-for-applicants
"Understanding your LSAT Score," Apr 2, 2023.
The three graphs at the article's end display both kurtosis and truncation, as you predicted. However, the "2020-2022 US & Canadian Applicants' Highest Score" curve is quite Gaussian in appearance up to a score of ~175 (~98%; ~2.5 deviations above the mean).
An unrelated but interesting observation:
"Law schools report percentiles not averages to the USNews
Assume a school has an accepted student profile that equates to an entering class 25th percentile LSAT score of 170. In front of the admissions committee are two candidates [competing for one position], one with a top LSAT score of 120 and one with a top LSAT score of 169. [Either student can be selected without having] any effect on the school’s LSAT profile."
It looks like the total number of black law students went up. Did more apply as a reaction to the SCOTUS case, or is it an Up Yours by the schools? Any white student who really wanted to go to a top school but was rejected is probably fine with it, but maybe some Asian rejects will try to rake in some cash, if they're patient enough.
It must be mortifying to go to a grad school where you're so far out of your league. Undergrad, you're usually not so obvious.
It is up-yours.
Since the LSAT remains only one of several factors in determining admission it should not surprise us that black applicants continue to be admitted at a higher rate than their LSAT performance alone would predict. Black applicants to elite law schools quite obviously have superior personalities when compared to asians or white folk. How could we explain the genius and popularity of rap music if that were not so?
And personality can actually make a difference at, say, personal injury law.
But Big Law with starting salaries of $225,000 is mostly about contracts, in which personality plays only a small role.
I thought success in personal injury law is more about the size of your billboard and how easy your phone number is to dial.
Why don't we see personal-injury ads on social media? (Or do some people see them?)
Are you sure? I have very little knowledge of the business of law, but in other fields people are far more swayed by confidence than competence. Seems to me incompetence in contract law would show up much later, if and when something went wrong.
OTOH, maybe the partners oversee the associates closely enough to detect it and do frequent weeding.
Has anybody out there ever been both a Big Law lawyer and a computer programmer and could comment on my analogy between the two careers?
I knew a partner in a heavyweight corporate law firm in 1989 who programmed in C for his fun hobby.
It's a good analogy. I am a good programmer and have read a lot of contracts over the years, and the similarities are many. Law has a language, and if you mess up the syntax you will have problems. Large programs or contracts are broken up into sections, objects, methods, etc. and a good lawyer and a good programmer know the value of reusing code that has been proven to work. Of course you don't get to 'run' your contract until someone sues you or you sue the other party, so they are much harder to debug.
I had a software idea that I never (yet) pursued, which was to make an IDE (integrated development environment) for law, take advantage of the code quality and reuse that programmers have figured out over the decades. I didn't think I was anywhere deep enough on law to attempt it, though I had some ideas.
It's now also interesting to think about the uses of generative AI in contract law. It seems like an obvious fit, given that genAI is (very broadly speaking) a mashup between coding and writing.
Does anyone know to what degree law firms are trusting genAI to draft contracts? And, assuming they're using it -- which seems likely, since it has the potential to save so very much time and money -- do they insist every contract be read end to end to ensure it doesn't have any hallucinations?
I appreciate that your comment is sarcastic, but I'll clarify for any less knowledgeable readers:
LSAT scores are by far the most important factor in law school admissions, followed by undergraduate GPA and underrepresented minority (URM) status. (See Mike Spivey's admissions bible for details.)
One interesting thing about law school admissions is that your numerical GPA is generally more important than the prestige/rigor of your undergraduate school. A 4.00 in communications from Midwestern State U is arguably better than a 3.5 in Mechanical Engineering from Harvard for your admissions chances. The reason being that undergrad GPA average is factored into USNWR rankings, which 99% of law schools are obsessed with.
Lawyers enjoy legal challenges much more than others, and they rarely pay the bill, so it doesn't surprise me much to see them flouting this decision.
So far, all that the 2024 Supreme Court crackdown on Affirmative Action has accomplished is two lost Republican Congressional seats in Alabama and Louisiana, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh's cover for supporting the Affirmative Action crackdown that was ignored anyway.
For the law schools with median-LSAT scores in the 170s, the student body is drawn overwhelmingly from the IQ125 to IQ140 range.
(Straight-line conversion: LSAT170 = IQ around the mid-130s; the Reddit r/cognitivetesting people put it at IQ133; IQ-blogger PumpkinPerson has put it several points higher; with the caveat that all these scores are probably, in aggregate, subject to good-tester bias and preparation bias at the top end, and "actual IQ" may tend to be moderately lower. In other words, these are percentile conversions and the population looked at is at the very tip-top of the pyramid, so it's top-heavy with over-performers and not balanced-out by any sort of underperformers, as you quite-fast run out of people once the IQ140 range starts.)
Yale's reported median of LSAT175 would be around IQ140. Mathematically, Blacks "should" be around 0.35% of slots at Yale Law School. That from a hypothetical randomly-selected group of IQ140 Americans. That would put a given year-cohort at Yale Law at 0 or 1 Black most of the time.
Their actual level of 12.2% of Yale Law in 2024 overrepresents Blacks by about 35x (mathematical: 0.35%; actual: 12.2%). That kind of racial-favoritism is consistent with our "regime" and its goals.
But since the precedent of disparate impact assumes that people will be represented in the same proportion as their population in the applicant pool, maybe the people who sue cannot use this math to prove their point. If not they would have to go through discovery and find shenanigans. I didn't read the Harvard case, but maybe to law professors it serves as a guide to hide shenanigans.
Hi Steve - I think you transposed New York Law School and New York University. I'm pretty sure NYU is one of the "14" and not the nearby NYLS (with LSAT average of 152).
I do doubt it will make a diff, but NYU is down a tiny bit whereas NYLS is up a tiny bit.
Thanks, I will try to fix this.
This is probably not relevant but here in Colorado personal injury lawyers (at least the one that advertise on the TV) are either white or Hispanic. We have the "Strong Arm of the Law" and "Win Big with " [add last name]. Seems to be more than enough work to go around.
A generation ago, East Texas and Louisiana had some hot shot black personal injury lawyers. The WSJ was always reporting on their latest outrageous antics in front of sympathetic juries.
Don't be so sure. I once attended a CLE seminar headlined by a lawyer who specialized in attorney divorces. He said that he saw a lot of ltax returns showing income of 40k.
So Florida A & M are the biggest scofflaws, eh?
The most striking numbers in the chart above suggest that aspiring black lawyers have recognized that it just might be easier to go to historically black law schools. Notice that almost all of the biggest increases in black admissions went to HBCUs.
I presume that your third year at an HBCU is spent in prepping to pass the bar exam while at Yale you are instead invited to contemplate the thisness of that and the like for your last year because of course you'll pass the bar exam.
Just a general comment - documenting absolute 2023 to 2024 admission changes Table 1 in percent is a little bit "misleading". Absolute changes are redundant because everyone with IQ>90 will be able to calculate them on his/her own. Relative changes are more interesting, since not everyone does mental high-speed fractions and for lack of a calculator, lol. Actually, I was surprized my new smartphone didn't have one preinstalled! Times fly! Anyway, Harvard saw a 55% relative reduction in numbers - biggest among the peers. Obviously, the effect was drowned by other Ivy League members - Stanford had an almost 2-fold increase. Sounds like a case of whack a mole...
Having graduated from New York Law School, I think you meant to highlight NYU, and not New York Law School.
It's unfortunate, but "So sue me" is a bigger part of the law than people realize.
With respect to the business of law, you can go a long way being an asocial nerd but partnership is where they start sorting between the legal technicians and the law firm's business owners. Law firms like confident, smart, likeable people in the partnership because that's who their clients want sweeping into the conference room and demonstrating a quick, comprehensive understanding of the industry and the client's needs.
This is the backstory to "lawyers" like Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama. They really don't understand either law or business. So the firm scrambles to land them in these frivolous late-stage democracy jobs where all they have to do is stand there, have tits and be black.
Did you ever read <i>The Good Black</i>? It's about a HLS grad who won a race discrimination verdict, in D.C. against a firm that denied him partnership, only to have it reversed on appeal. I found the factual background to be fascinating.
He began his career at the Houston office of bankruptcy powerhouse Weil Gotshal. After 4 years they told him he wouldn't make partner because he didn't work hard enough, an assessment with which he agreed. They kept him on salary for a year while he looked for a new spot. He landed at the tiny D.C. office (about 10 lawyers) of a big Chicago firm, which he says promised to make him a partner down the road. At this small outpost, The Good Black practiced insurance insolvency, an exceedingly narrow and not very lucrative corner of the law.
The billings of the D.C. office overwhelming came from a star insurance litigator, famous for his treatise on demonstrative evidence. But that guy left, because his property/casualty clients didn't want to pay big firm rates. This departure caused Chicago to close their D.C. office, at which point The Good Black moved to Chicago, where he didn't know anyone, and announced, "okay I'm here, time to make me a partner," and they said dream on. How anyone thought these facts added up to a discrimination claim I'll never know.
The author of the book is a white HLS classmate of The Good Black.
BigLaw is the NFL. Good luck suing them for discrimination.
The joke on my side of the v. is the John Grisham novels are stupid; we don't get paid enough to cheat.
Just a random scroll through produced two examples that surprised me: Liberty University nearly doubled its share of black admits from 4% and change to 8% and change, and Indiana University its low and probably quite honest 3% rate down to 1%. Seems sort of surprising as a state school in a typical prog college town/faculty/staff.
I thought Heather Mac Donald had some stat’s wrt CA law schools in her book, “The Diversity Delusion”. The stat’s pointing to lower admission standards via LSAT producing lower quality graduates—as per class standing. I don’t see where the top Ivy’s would be much different in result, albeit they’d get the pick of the “best” minorities, but that number is a limited pool to be sure. The ultimate result we are now seeing to mask this result is the attempt to remove/moderate State bar exams, which minority graduates have an especially difficult time passing. My particular fear is that lower qualified student in *any* program of studies necessitate a lowering of standards within that program, hence producing less qualified graduates—minority or otherwise. Seen this is my department.