Loss of UC Diversity Means Lost Opportunity for Law Students

California is now a “majority-minority” state, according to Census Bureau estimates. Not UCLA School of Law’s class of 2003. Of 305 students enrolled in the only public law school in Southern California, 70% are white and 30% minority, with Asian Americans the largest group by far. While there is no express requirement that the student bodies of public universities mirror the people who fund them, and while the University of California appropriately thinks of itself as a national university, the stark divergence between California’s demographics and those of the UCLA School of Law may have troubling consequences for the state’s future lawyers.

Four admissions cycles without affirmative action have most affected African American and Mexican American representation. There are five blacks (only one black male) among UCLA’s first-year law students, about 2% of the entering class. There are 16 Chicanos, about 5%. The numbers are only slightly better at Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, where seven blacks enrolled this fall.

The problem is not limited to California. The University of Texas Law School, which was ordered by a court to end affirmative action, graduated five blacks last spring, the same number as it did in 1950, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to Texas’ long-standing exclusion of blacks from its flagship law school.

There are many reasons to be alarmed by these trends. As someone who teaches criminal law to first-year students, I worry that we are ill-preparing a generation of lawyers to practice in multiracial California. Criminal law is one of six doctrinal courses that first-year students at UCLA Law must take. For the second consecutive year, my class lacks an African American. Last year, I had one Mexican American student; this year, I have three.

How is racial diversity in the classroom relevant to teaching criminal justice?

To answer this question, it is helpful to understand something about the peculiarities of the law-school classroom. Most law professors use some form of the “Socratic method,” a pedagogical device involving sometimes rigorous interaction between professor, who poses questions, and students, who must engage extemporaneously with the professor. Even when professors relax the method, students are expected to play a significant role in discussions. In such circumstances, the demographics of the classroom take on pedagogical significance.

Last week, for example, my class discussed cases in which an intentional killing is downgraded from murder to voluntary manslaughter because a defendant claims he killed in the heat of passion. Historically, the heat-of-passion defense arose when a man killed in response to witnessing his wife in an act of sexual intercourse with another man. Today, the defense is frequently asserted in nonmarital relationships, too. Discussion of these types of cases are immeasurably enriched when female law students are present to participate.

One need not be an essentialist--that is, claim that all women or all blacks think alike--to see the value of having a diverse law-school classroom along racial, ethnic, gender and other lines. In terms of race, we need only take seriously the claim that racial identity matters to self-perception and the perceptions of others; we need not subscribe to the view that racial identity is the only thing that matters or even that it is always the most important variable. For example, some have contended that middle-class blacks don’t genuinely diversify an academic setting. In attitudes toward and experience with the criminal-justice system, however, polls show stark differences between blacks and whites across income levels and educational achievement. After all, blacks are five times, and Latinos three times, as likely as whites to be imprisoned in the United States.

Clearly, race plays a powerful role in shaping views of criminal justice in all its facets, from perceptions of police brutality and corruption to attitudes toward alternative sentencing, incarceration and the death penalty, to assessments of the fairness and workability of such criminal doctrines as self-defense and provocation.

In light of this reality, an ideal learning situation, inside or outside law school, would be one in which classroom conversation reflected a diversity of viewpoints and experiences, including racial diversity. In other words, one that looked a lot more like majority-minority California.

In fact, the first criminal-law class I taught, in 1994, looked like California. The conversations about crime and justice were intense. For example, because there was a critical mass of black students, they could disagree with each other and, in doing so, moved all students forward intellectually. I still hear from students in that class who say those experiences have benefited their legal practices.

Seven years ago, I interviewed for teaching jobs at several other top law schools. One factor that made UCLA my top choice was its aggressive affirmative-action program and the prospect of teaching students of all races. My interviews occurred a year after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, and, I suppose, I was too idealistic in thinking that, at UCLA, I might be part of the conversation that would move us to the next step in U.S. race relations. For that conversation to happen, everyone has to be present at the table.

Four years after the implementation of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in California’s public sector, we are farther than ever from realizing this kind of inclusion. And I wonder how long we will continue to let our students down by not adequately preparing them to practice law in majority-minority California.