Author: Minorities’ access to law schools limited

In arguing against what he sees as the too-lofty entry requirements imposed by American Bar Association accreditation for United States law schools, Massachusetts School of Law at Andover Dean Lawrence R. Velvel says that minority students and those of lesser means are being kept out of the profession.
“We oppose rules which, in our judgment, make law school and thus the legal profession far less accessible to people who are from less affluent groups, who are minority people, who don’t have the kind of money possessed by the vast run of people who do enter law school,” he told Providence Business News in a recent interview. “And we’ve not been successful in opposing these rules.”
Velvel is author of “The Gathering Peasants’ Revolt in Legal Education,” published in 2008. The 109-page book, which he co-wrote with Prof. Kurt Olson, is a point-by-point analysis of problems Velvel sees in legal academia.
It includes his argument that law schools should be able to accept students from all score ranges on the mandated Law School Admission Test and that law schools shouldn’t have to employ only full-time professors, as ABA requires. “ABA has a very narrow definition of full-time professors,” Velvel said.
“We’re reiterating our law school’s long-standing prior objection to the ABA rules and to the fact that state supreme courts, Rhode Island’s being one of them, demand that a law school be accredited by the ABA or else its graduates will not be permitted to take the bar exam, no matter how fine the law school may be,” he added.
Rhode Island Bar Association President Richard A. Pacia, who operates Richard A. Pacia Law Associates LLC in Pawtucket, said many professions – including medical, dental and accounting – have standards similar to those put in place by ABA.
“Otherwise, malpractice would run rampart,” he said. “I think it’s important that we have these standards in place so that the public can be comfortable that the students who go to these schools and ultimately get admitted to practice have met minimal standards of competency. Those standards have to be met, irrespective of concerns for diversity.”
Velvel grouped the LSAT test with the Standard Aptitude Tests required for admission to undergraduate programs. “Like the SAT, there’s no proof that it is necessary to get a good score on the LSAT in order to do good in law school or to be a good lawyer,” he said. “In point of fact, whatever evidence we’ve got shows that a person’s score on the LSAT does not determine how they’ll do in law school.”
But, Pacia added, diversity in the profession has been a growing issue for law schools and there’s a push for law schools to better reflect the diversity of the population. Next May, a commission appointed by ABA to study diversity in the country’s law schools will present its findings at the group’s annual meeting.
“I think you see law schools making efforts to reach out and increase diversity” through scholarships, Pacia said, including at Roger Williams University School of Law, the only law school in the Ocean State. “Statistically speaking, the legal profession is less diverse than the medical and dental professions. So diversity is a concern.”
Pacia pointed to RWU professor Jorge Elorza as an example of the changing academia. Elorza, raised in Providence by parents who were Guatemalan immigrants, has been on the faculty at RWU since 2005 and is now in the process of creating the Rhode Island Latino Policy Institute.
And there are several diversity organizations for RWU students. Along with the Latino Law Students Association, there are similar groups for multicultural, black and Asian Pacific students. According to the profile of the class that entered the school in the fall of 2008, about 9 percent of the 181 students were from diversity groups.
At MSL, where there are about 670 law students enrolled, Velvel said the school doesn’t track student ethnicity. But he estimates that between 30 percent and 35 percent of students are minority students. That’s higher than national averages, Velvel said.
“For African Americans, it hovers around 6 percent or 7 percent. For Latinos, it hovers around 4 percent,” he said.
MSL is not accredited by ABA, but is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. But 45 states require an ABA-accredited education to take bar exams.
“Our students can take the bar exam in Massachusetts by special dispensation,” Velvel said. The school has also earned for its students the ability to take bar exams in Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, California, Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C. “But we’re in much better shape than any other non-ABA-accredited school.”
Velvel points to state courts as part of the problem in keeping minority students out of law schools, “because it is their ruling as to who can take the bar that gives ABA their power.”
About 200 law schools are ABA-accredited in the United States, while about 40 are not. Most of those that don’t have the ABA accreditation are in California, where the state issues its own accreditations. In Massachusetts, there are MSL and North Dartmouth’s Southern New England School of Law, Velvel said. In the 1990s, MSL started the argument against the strict ABA standards and the unwillingness of most states to recognize other accreditations.
“But when it became obvious that we could not succeed, because the deck is just too stacked against us in the state and federal courts, we gave up fighting it,” he said.
But a January 2008 U.S. Department of Education hearing on ABA accreditation spurred Velvel and Olson to sit down and write the book and re-enter the debate. •