Law schools are the gateways to a legal profession that lacks diversity by race, ethnicity, gender, disability and more. An important step to creating a more diverse legal profession is to change law schools’ admission policies.
More than a dozen top law schools, including Yale, UC Berkeley and UCLA, have decided not to cooperate with rankings by US News & World Report. These annual rankings are widely considered to be test-driven, favoring law schools with admitted classes having higher average LSAT test scores. The decision to boycott the rankings may help reduce selective law schools’ overreliance on LSAT scores (or GRE scores, which are accepted as an alternative by half the law schools), but there is a countervailing reality with much greater impact.
Law schools are now dramatically out of step with two connected movements: test-optional admissions in undergraduate and graduate higher education, and the public’s increasing scorn of admissions tests since the Varsity Blues scandal. In all other domains of higher education, supporters of admission tests are on the defensive. But not at U.S. law schools.
