Does Affirmative Action Help or Hinder Black People Who Want To Become Lawyers?

I found an interesting article by Carol J Williams, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, based on a study by Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. I decided to share the main facts and arguments from the article. If you want to read the entire article, I posted the link at the bottom.

According to Richard Sander's research study, he released two years ago, the difficulty many black lawyers face when trying to make partner are due to law firms' racial preferences. The study also suggests black lawyers are hired under-qualified, compared to their white colleagues, and often fail when there is a credential gap between them and white lawyers.

Now Sander is back with another study, this time whether law schools set up many affirmative action beneficiaries for failure by admitting them into rigorous academic environments in which they are ill-prepared to compete. Sander wants to show that affirmative action hurts the very people it was intended to help in the hiring and admissions preferences.

Using records from the Bar Association of California, Sander hopes to prove why blacks are four times more likely to fail the bar exam on the first try.

The Bar Association of California has denied Sander access to it records. Sander has filed a lawsuit against the association claiming the association is a publicly funded institution whose records should be open to scrutiny by legitimate researchers.

Supporting Sander's study, Douglas Williams, an associate professor of Economics, believes the the study will help explain why there are racial gaps in law school graduation rates and bar passage.

Harvard Law School graduate, Deborah Waire, argued "What this suggests is that Richard Sander is not studying affirmative action or diversity policies; he is marshaling evidence to show that blacks do not belong in elite schools or elite firms."

Thoughts?

Source:
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=c/a/2008/09/14/MNGK12Q663.DTL