Law school campuses have slowly grown more racially diverse during the past decade, to the point that minorities now account for 25 percent of law students nationally. But legal educators worry that the U.S. Supreme Court will use the closely watched Fisher v. Texas to curtail the use of affirmative action in college admissions and derail this modest progress.
“Even without a so-called affirmative-action ban, law schools aren’t doing great in terms of diversity,” said Vermont Law School professor Jackie Gardina, co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). “Schools are still struggling to fill a class that is representative of the people who live in this country, and that’s without a real roadblock from the Supreme Court. Would we move to 95 percent white if they were to ban it?”
