PHILADELPHIA — When Chayla Sherrod learned she had been selected as the next editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review — the oldest and one of the most prestigious law journals in the country — she was thrilled.
Then she found out her law school classmates Simone Hunter-Hobson and Layla June West would be the editors of two other law journals at Penn, marking the first time in Penn’s history that three of its seven law journals are being led by Black women.
“I felt kind of like this silent support already,” said Sherrod, 25, of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Editors in chief of the student-staffed journals, which select and publish leading legal scholarship by academics and students, are selected by student editors from the prior year.
The women are among 7.2% of the 824-member law school student body who identify as Black, although a similar percentage reported they are two or more races.
“We’re small, but we’re mighty,” said Hunter-Hobson, 24, who grew up in Harlem and who is editor in chief of the Journal of Constitutional Law and president of Penn’s Black Law Students Association.
Their selection comes as the U.S. Senate just confirmed the first Black female Supreme Court justice — introduced to the U.S. Senate, in fact, by Penn law professor Lisa Fairfax — and as Penn’s law school continues to wrestle with the case of Amy Wax, the professor who in the past has called into question the academic ability of Black students and most recently publicly commented that the country would be better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration. Earlier this year, Penn’s law dean, Ted Ruger, invoked a review process that could lead to sanctions against her.
“Sitting here in these positions defies and contradicts whatever she has said about Black students and our intellectual capability, worth and belonging,” said Hunter-Hobson, who recently wrote a research report on how racism and sexism in the legal field, particularly at law schools, harm the health of Black women.
Wax is certainly a concern for the women, but they also want the law school to work harder to diversify the curriculum and hire more staff and faculty of color.
Wax “is one individual actor in a larger systemic problem and I would love to see both fronts addressed with the same amount of short- and long-term attention or urgency,” said West, 27, of Chicago, who heads the Journal of Law and Social Change.
All three women said major developments in the case of Breonna Taylor — a Black woman who was fatally shot by police during a botched raid of her Kentucky apartment in 2020 — didn’t come up in their first-year law classes.
“An opportunity was lost,” Sherrod said. “That was quite disheartening.”
In a message to the law school community in February, Ruger said Penn Law has made strides to become more inclusive, including more financial aid and scholarships for students from underrepresented backgrounds and more diverse faculty hires. Since 2019, it has added 30 courses that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, he said, including “Law and Inequality,” “Disability Law” and “Community Lawyering to End Mass Incarceration.”
Nearly half of the most recent law school class identifies as students of color, he said.
“We hear and appreciate the advocacy of our students, staff, faculty and alumni, and are confident that we can continue to increase access and diversity, while expanding education and training on critical matters of equity, justice, and inclusion,” Ruger said.
Sherrod acknowledged the efforts but added, “They need to actively continue those efforts to address the needs of Black students.”
Penn’s had the most Black editors
First published in 1852 as the American Law Register, Penn’s Law Review was the country’s first. In addition, Penn has law journals covering topics such as business and international law. The journals — the primary outlet for faculty scholarship — receive hundreds, in some cases thousands, of submissions each year.
Students gain membership through a series of competitive writing and editing assessments, and nearly half the student body are admitted. Journal staffs edit and review pieces, sometimes write their own, and some host an annual symposium.
Many editors go on to prominent legal careers. A 28-year-old Barack Obama was the first Black person to head the Harvard Law Review, in 1990. Leondra Kruger, a justice on the California Supreme Court who was under consideration for the most recent U.S. Supreme Court opening, had been Yale’s editor.
More law schools began to select Black editors after Obama became president in 2008 and even more so after George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent racial reckoning, said Leonard Baynes, dean of the University of Houston Law Center, who has researched Black editors in chief of law reviews at the country’s 194 predominantly white law schools.
The first Black editor, Clara Burrill Bruce, came in 1926 at Boston University. Twenty-seven years would pass before the next. There were few per decade in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, then 12 in the ’90s, he said.
Since 2008, there have been 57, and nearly half of that in the last three years, he said.
Penn has had more Black editors of its main law review than any other university, Baynes said. The first, Vernon L. Francis, a partner at Dechert LLP in Philadelphia, was selected in 1986. Others came in 2000, 2009, 2015 and three of the last four years.
“The greatest gift of working on the journal is you get to watch really great people grapple with the big questions,” Francis said. “You have to think to keep up with it and be decent editors.”
‘My passion is making sure I push it forward’
Sherrod, Hunter-Hobson and West said Penn Law has offered valuable connections to preeminent scholars and a network of prestigious alumni. They also cited strong support from classmates through the Black student association.
“I find it so important, now that we are leaders in the school, to give back to that community that poured so much into me,” said West, a Howard University graduate who got a master’s at New York University in Africana studies and did a Fulbright fellowship in Cape Town.
Hunter-Hobson, who hopes to pursue appellate litigation, wants to create a pipeline for others.
“My mom says, ‘To whom much is given much is required,’” she said. “My passion is making sure I push it forward.”
West, who hopes to return to Howard as a law professor, said she was drawn to Penn because of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, Penn Law’s first Black female graduate, in 1927. Alexander was denied participation on the law review by the then-dean and her classmates stood up for her, Ruger said.
“The existing law review editorial board probably composed entirely of white men sort of threatened to go on strike if they didn’t have Dr. Alexander as their colleague, and the dean backed down,” Ruger said.
Hunter-Hobson, Sherrod and West said the half-dozen or so Black professors on the faculty support them, and they’re grateful for that. But there should be more Black professors.
They also would like to see more diversity among staff.
“It would be nice to walk into an office and just see someone who looks like me,” said Sherrod, who got her bachelor’s in environmental studies and political science from Villanova and was a Fulbright scholar in Namibia, where she taught earth science at a primary school.
Other law schools have challenges, too, Hunter-Hobson found. She interviewed 34 Black female law students from around the country, with nearly 90% saying the law school experience “greatly or severely” affected their health. They reported feeling undervalued and disrespected in a still white, male-focused environment.
“The continual denial of Black women’s existence and intellectual contributions in the classroom causes many Black women to work 10 times as hard compared to their counterparts just to prove their worth, and ultimately leads to serious health concerns, such as anxiety, loss of appetite, and self-doubt,” wrote Hunter-Hobson, a George Washington University journalism graduate.
She also wrote that Black female students found their experiences seemingly discounted, with professors failing to discuss issues such as the killing of Black people by police.
“When police murdered Walter Wallace Jr. just a few minutes away from Penn Law’s campus, several professors did not discuss or even acknowledge the tragedy that weighed heavily on the hearts of many Black students,” Hunter-Hobson wrote.
The women said it is difficult to see Wax still using her Penn perch to make statements. Those statements gave them pause when they applied to Penn and every year, a new group struggles with it.
“I can’t tell you how many newly admitted Black students have emailed me or DM’d me, ‘Her being at the school is going to decide ... whether I’m going to Penn Law or not,’” Sherrod said.
But the three women are focused on using their positions to give ample voice to younger, diverse authors, while keeping doctrine and history.
“It’s so exciting to be able to advance people’s careers and give them a platform and invite other voices to the table,” said Sherrod, who hopes to help Black communities gain more access to environmental services, including green space.
Sherrod is a first-generation student, the daughter of a postmaster and classroom paraprofessional. Her grandmother went to school until the sixth grade.
“So I feel this responsibility to my family to take up this space but also to do it justice,” she said. “Thinking my grandma, two generations removed, was a sharecropper in Mississippi and now I’m in law school, leading the oldest journal in the country, is, like, insane.”
———
