Law and Diversity Program

Purpose

It is a documented fact that in the United States people of color and other minorities are both underrepresented in the legal system and have little faith in it. To achieve proportional representation in the legal field today, the number of Asian American lawyers would have to double, the number of Hispanic lawyers more than triple, and that of African American and Native American lawyers quadruple. As minority populations all but double over the next 50 years, their underrepresentation in the legal profession may worsen dramatically.

The Law and Diversity Program seeks to meet this need by recruiting minority and non-traditional students who have either not considered entering the legal profession or who need to improve their skills in order to gain admission to law school. The program provides an academically demanding environment where the students’ perspectives are valued and their needs for various kinds of support are met.

Innovative Features

The Law and Diversity Program was created at Fairhaven College, an interdisciplinary college of Western Washington University dedicated to innovative approaches to education. Most Fairhaven students design their own academic concentrations, a structure that easily accommodates the project’s pre-law curriculum.

The program recruits non-traditional and minority students—those whose perspectives and experiences have been traditionally underrepresented in law schools, the legal profession and the law. Its graduates include African Americans from crime-filled urban neighborhoods, a Chamorro woman from the Northern Mariana Islands who became the first native lawyer on her island, a refugee from the civil war in Eritrea, former gang members, single mothers, mature students, students whose backgrounds include poverty, rape and abuse, and activists from the disabled and gay communities.

When they begin the program after completing their general education requirements, students become members of a two-year learning community. Law and Diversity Program students often show academic promise but have marginal records and tend to give up when studies become demanding. The program’s cohort system helps them to succeed despite the rigorous material, while the common curriculum allows them to form close ties with faculty and to synthesize their learning.

Given their adverse personal and financial circumstances, many of the program’s students require support, both emotional and economic, from faculty, from mentors and role models, and from each other. Faculty coordinate efforts with the financial aid office, the registrar, the counseling center and the writing center to ensure that help is available. The admissions office assists in recruitment, and the development office raises funds (for emergency loans, scholarships and other forms of assistance) from private individuals and local law firms.

The curriculum consists in part of core courses, taught by two instructors who share a full-time appointment. These instructors also teach the integrative seminar, serve as "master learners," and offer advice and personal support to students. The rest of the curriculum is made up of existing courses in a number of different departments, which Law and Diversity students take as a group along with the general university population.

Before designing the program, faculty consulted with representatives of local law schools and were advised that it was more important for the curriculum to emphasize verbal, analytical and research skills than to teach a specific body of knowledge. Accordingly, faculty selected challenging, skills-intensive courses that introduce students to the U.S. legal system, familiarize them with basic legal concepts and terminology, and place the law in its social, historical and political context.

The curriculum includes, among others, courses on American legal and political systems, political economics, race, politics and public policy, and logic and problem solving. The constitutional law course has proven particularly effective for law school preparation. In it students use Gerald Gunther’s constitutional law casebook in small question-and-answer groups.

The quarterly integrative seminar is designed to synthesize knowledge, discuss law school admissions and focus on specific skills. The last seminar deals with the law as a profession.

The curriculum not only demands considerable amounts of writing and critical thinking but also allows students to participate in one or two mock arguments and have exposure to basic legal research. The courses vary from year to year but their challenging nature and their focus on communication skills remain constant.

The final quarter consists of an intensive internship. Students work as clerks in law firms, courts, and city, state and federal legal offices. They also serve in investigative positions with the public defender’s office, as legal advocates for victims of domestic violence, and in other positions at the American Civil Liberties Union, lawyer referral services, disability rights groups and juvenile detention facilities.

Students receive various forms of help in applying to law school. Faculty make pertinent materials available and arrange for students to visit nearby law schools and attend classes. Because program faculty know their students well, they are able to write detailed letters of recommendation. Because many students apply with below average numerical indicators, the letters address the students’ actual performance on relevant topics. A commercial provider of an LSAT preparation course makes it available to each cohort for a fraction of the $795 fee.

Evaluation and Project Impact

The efforts to gauge the effects of the project included student self-assessments, focus group assessments by faculty and students, writing portfolios, LSAT preparation and scores, a video documentary, retention and academic performance data, and interviews of all 29 alumni and of faculty and staff of the law and graduate schools in which they enrolled.

Project staff compared the students’ diagnostic LSAT scores, taken prior to the start of the preparation course, to the final scores. The mean score for students in the two cohorts went from 136 to 145, and from 139 to 146 respectively, raising the mean percentile for both classes 19 points. For the students who went to law school, the improvements were even more dramatic, with percentiles rising by as much as 25 points.

Retention statistics are also encouraging. Of the 29 students participating in the Law and Diversity Program, 93 percent completed the program and 96 percent the bachelor’s degree. This compares quite favorably with the university’s minority junior-to-senior retention of 54 percent for those who entered as freshmen, and 48 percent for transfers.

Of the 29 students tracked, 16 applied to law school and 12 were admitted, and of these, by the end of the project, all but one were still attending or had graduated. Two students went to graduate school, and five obtained law-related jobs. The rest were studying to retake the LSAT and pursuing other interests and jobs. Most intended to continue their education.

Students felt "satisfied" to "highly satisfied" with the program and thought the cohort experience valuable, despite conflicts that arose in the second cohort. They appreciated the faculty’s care and support but criticized what they felt was their excessive leniency. Although they thought that it needed more focus and structure, students found the integrative seminar useful.

Faculty and staff at the graduate and law schools that graduates of the program attended stated that the students had been well prepared. Indeed, most were performing above the traditional numerical predictors of academic success.

Law students felt that the program had trained them adequately, although they stated that more work on specific skills—such as methods of case analysis—and more counseling on the isolating and competitive nature of law school would have been helpful. One student, who had the lowest LSAT score in her entering class, submitted the top paper on the first legal writing assignment and, at the end of the first year, ranked 90th out of a class of 216. Another student, with LSAT scores in the 55th percentile, finished the first year in the top 15-20 percent of the class.

Many alumni are active in community service, working with youth athletic programs, juvenile offenders, victims of domestic violence, migrant farm workers, homeless youth, AIDS education in minority communities, and gay and disability rights issues. Students attending law school become involved with campus organizations—some of which they have started themselves. They also study abroad, write for law reviews and work as interns and clerks.

In 1996 the Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar issued a statement regarding preparation for legal education that echoes many of the provisions of the Law and Diversity Program. The assertion that "difficult courses from demanding instructors is the best generic preparation for legal education" especially reflects the convictions of the creators of this project.

Lessons Learned

Project staff did not find it easy to recruit students of color into the program, because the community where the university is located is predominantly white, and the student population is only 13 percent minority. This also made it difficult to find local minority lawyers and judges and firms to provide internships. Fortunately, lawyers and judges in metropolitan areas of the state readily offered assistance.

From the beginning, discussion of the issues surrounding diversity was a fundamental feature of the program. It soon became obvious, however, that students did not spontaneously understand the commonalities among all forms of oppression and tended instead to engage in a comparison of oppressions, with the cohort eventually fragmenting into groups segregated by race, gender and sexual preference. In the future, much of the first quarter will be devoted to helping students develop the ability to understand and support each other despite their differences—a skill which is being increasingly recognized by law schools as essential for good lawyering.

Instead of receiving standard grades, in some Law and Diversity Program classes students wrote narrative self-evaluations to which the instructor responded. It soon became apparent that students were putting more effort into their regularly-graded classes because they assumed that law school admissions relied heavily on grade point averages. In fact, law schools did not view self-evaluations as problematic. Staff informed students of this and instructed them on how best to present their self evaluations in applications. They are also providing an application cover sheet explaining the purpose and use of self-evaluations.

Despite the virtues of the cohort system, staff became aware of the need to better integrate Law and Diversity Program students with the rest of the campus, and to offer special advising to those who, while enrolled in the program, discover that law school is not for them. In response to students’ desire to pursue areas of individual interest, staff decided to grant later cohorts flexibility in the second year to take several courses outside the Law and Diversity curriculum.

To better accommodate law school application cycles, faculty changed from the traditional fall-winter-spring academic year to a winter-spring-fall schedule. Applications are normally prepared in December, which, under the traditional system, gave faculty just four quarters to work with students prior to writing letters of recommendation. In the modified year, on the other hand, students have nearly finished the sixth and final quarter by the time they apply to law school. (After completing the Law and Diversity Program, students may take further courses if they choose.)

Project Continuation

The project has continued since the expiration of FIPSE funding, with the third cohort continuing the high retention of its predecessors and graduating in June of 1997. The university converted the program director’s full-time faculty position to tenure-track. Two other faculty members also participate in the program.

Dissemination and Recognition

Faculty and students made presentations at a number of conferences, and their remarks led to discussions about adapting the Law and Diversity Program to other campuses. Audiences generally felt that the model’s interdisciplinary requirements would preclude its being adapted in its entirety but perceived the cohort and skills development approaches as having considerable potential for replication. While the program at Western Washington University focuses on pre-law preparation for minority and other disadvantaged students, staff believe that the model, or parts of it, can work for any group of students.

The project received Western Washington University’s Diversity Achievement Award.

Available Information

Further information may be obtained from:

Marie Eaton
Fairhaven College
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA 98225-9118
Telephone: 360-650-3680

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