What’s New
The number of Black students starting Harvard Law School this fall dropped significantly following the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, according to enrollment data released this week.
Only 19 Black first-year students enrolled at the law school this fall—accounting for 3.4 percent of the total class, the data from the American Bar Association shows. The law school’s first-year class had 43 Black students in 2023 and 50 in 2022.
The number of Black students who enrolled at the law school this year is the lowest since 1965, David B. Wilkins, a law professor at Harvard who has studied Black representation in the legal profession, told The New York Times.
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Why It Matters
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority last year barred colleges from considering race in admissions. The ruling came in response to challenges to admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, forcing universities nationwide to search for new ways to ensure campus diversity.
The impact of the ruling is still coming into focus, but Harvard and other universities have reported drops in enrollment among Black, Hispanic and Native American students.
After the Supreme ruling, many law schools changed their application essays in order to gain a deeper understanding of applicants and their backgrounds without running afoul of the decision.
What to Know
Overall, racial and ethnic diversity in law school enrollment did not decline in 2024. The percentage of Black and Hispanic students in the current first-year class is similar to 2023’s numbers, according to the bar association.
The data shows that the number of Black students at other top law schools declined less sharply than at Harvard following the Supreme Court’s ruling, while some saw numbers of first-year Black students increase.
Columbia Law School had 42 Black first-year students enrol this fall, down from 48 last year, according to the data. Meanwhile, Yale Law School had 25 Black students in its first-year class this fall, slightly up from 23 last year. And at Stanford University, the number of Black first-year students almost doubled this year to 23.
However, the bar association changed its reporting methodology this year to include students who are not U.S. residents in individual race categories instead of reporting them separately, complicating year-to-year comparisons.
What People Are Saying
Jeff Neal, a spokesman for Harvard Law School, said in a statement to Newsweek that the conclusions that can be drawn from one year of enrolment data are “limited.”
“When the Supreme Court ruled last year, it was understood that the decision would impact, in ways that could not be fully anticipated, the ability of educational institutions across the nation, including law schools, to attract and admit a diverse cohort of students,” he said.
“We continue to believe that a student body composed of persons with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences is a vital component of legal education. Harvard Law School remains committed both to following the law and to fostering an on-campus community and a legal profession that reflect numerous dimensions of human experience.”
David B. Wilkins, a law professor at Harvard, told the Times that this year saw “the lowest number of Black entering first-year students since 1965.”
He said “this obviously has a lot to do with the chilling effect created by [the Supreme Court’s] decision.”
Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been critical of affirmative action, told the newspaper that the drop in Black enrolment might be beneficial “because those students are going to go to another school where they’re better matched and they’re poised to succeed.”
What’s Next
Conservative legal groups may sue law schools that maintained or boosted their student diversity, Kellye Testy, the executive director of the Association of American Law Schools, told Reuters.
“I think people will want to argue that schools did something illegal, even though I don’t think that’s the case,” she said.
