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Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Some Interesting Data From the Yale Law Journal Survey
A statement from the Yale Law Journal announces the release of two reports as part of a two-year project of "address[ing] our diversity challenges and identify[ing] ways we can better foster an inclusive community." One of those is described as qualitative. The other is quantitative: Patterns in Yale Law Journal Admissions and Student Scholarship, by Ian Ayres and Anthony Cozart. Many of the data are quite interesting, with "interesting" here meant more literally than the word generally is in blogging; the word is used with no intention of signaling irony, suggestiveness, or implicit judgment.
By way of background, I should note that I am (slowly, slowly) at work on a book about social class and the American legal professoriate, with the general and, I hope, non-partisan thesis that social class, both currently and as a matter of background, influences the individual and cultural surround of law professors and, hence, affects the issues they are most likely to view as salient and to make a focus of their writing. This is (I will argue) often implicit and relatively rarely acknowledged; that in turn often takes social class both as a subject and as an admitted influence off the table, and makes class itself a less salient or frequently examined issue or identity aspect than other aspects of identity that receive frequent discussion. Without here suggesting how scholarship might change if things were different, and what topics might be more frequently discussed and (as important) accorded more prestige if they were--and certainly without suggesting that it would or must necessarily come from a particular political position--I suggest that more self-awareness and -examination would have an effect on the body of scholarly work produced by law professors, if greater recognition were given to class and its effects on who we are and what we see and do. (Needless to say, I'm happy to hear from correspondents on this project--especially those law professors who think their own experience and/or background is highly unusual in one direction or the other, or conversely who think their background is utterly typical, and might be willing to share that experience and their observations and views.)
My project focuses on the professoriate, not the students. In the case of Yale, however, that distinction is famously thin and the data on students might be viewed as a study of embryonic law professors. Much of the interesting data appear in a chart at pages 7-9 discussing the characteristics of all applicants, including transfer and third-year students, to volumes 123 through 125 of the Yale Law Journal. There is this, for instance, on the political views of the applicants:
Political Views: |
Democratic, Liberal, or Progressive 35% |
Republican, Conservative, or Libertarian 9% |
Moderate 17% |
Other (e.g., Independent) 6% |
Did Not Disclose 44% |
I do not find any of this terribly surprising (and I hope people don't equate "interesting" with "surprising"). But I am curious about the large percentage who did not disclose their political identification. There are all kinds of reasons one might refuse to disclose this, and having no reason at all or asserting that it ought to be irrelevant would be fine with me. But it is much higher than, say, the number of students who did not disclose or provided no information about their racial identification. Among other possibilities, I'd be interested in knowing whether many of these students were conservative and unwilling to say so. Or, rather, were they liberal or progressive and unwilling to answer for more strategic reasons--because they thought it would be detrimental to have too large a percentage of the class openly identified as such?
Highly interesting as well are the data on what the study calls "Family Characteristics." Of the students surveyed--who, remember, were students who had applied to the YLJ, not just the editors of that journal--46 percent disclosed family incomes of $100,000 or greater, including 19 percent from families with incomes over $250,000. (By comparison, those with family incomes under $60,000 made up 11 percent of those surveyed. Again, a high number of students--23 percent--did not disclose any family income information. On parental education, fully 45 percent of the journal applicants surveyed reported that both parents had attended graduate school--kind of a patrimonie des clercs. (No data are given on the percentage of applicants with at least one parent who attended graduate school.) Of the students themselves, 29 percent had attended Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and 43 percent some Ivy League university, while 35 percent attended a private non-Ivy university; by contrast, the 2011 CHE Almanac showed 73 percent of post-secondary students attended public colleges and universities and 0.4 percent attended Ivies, with 16 percent attending private colleges and universities. Only six percent of the applicants surveyed provided no information about their educational background. Also, ten percent had also attained a master's or doctorate.
All interesting, and of course there is much more in the study. For my purposes, I regret that the portion of the study that looks at students whose notes or comments were accepted for publication focuses on race and gender only, not on family or educational background.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on November 18, 2015 at 08:26 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink
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