African American Student Enrollment and Law School Ranking

Abstract

The director of the U.S. News law school rankings, Robert Morse, has initiated discussion about how – if at all – racial diversity should be included in the U.S. News rankings. This essay explores the relationship between African American student enrollment and U.S. News peer assessment scores of law schools. It explores this first at all ABA-approved law schools, and then within tiers of law schools. It finds a positive, though slight, relationship between African American student enrollment and peer assessment scores for the 26 most elite law schools, a marginally stronger relationship for the top 103 schools, and a slight negative relationship for the remaining schools. These findings are supplemented with data on the relationship between schools’ U.S. News peer assessment scores and their proportions of Asian American students, Hispanic students, and minority faculty.