Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The proposed project will address the question of whether the demographic match between law school instructors and students affects students’ course grades, future course-taking, or specialization decisions. Determining whether having a same-race or same-gender instructor affects students’ academic performance and choice of specialization, particularly among students from demographic backgrounds that are underrepresented in the legal profession, will improve our understanding of the barriers to obtaining law degrees and employment in the legal profession faced by such students even after they have been admitted to law school. Identifying the educational inputs under law schools’ control that influence the performance and decisions of female and racial and ethnic minority law students is important, as even among similarly credentialed students at top law schools, women and minorities often feel alienated in law school classrooms and are less likely to graduate than white men (e.g., Guinier et al. 1994). These disparities in law school experiences contribute to the underrepresentation of females and racial and ethnic minorities in the legal profession, particularly in the highest paying, most visible positions (Holder, 2001).

We use rich, longitudinal administrative data from large, private, top-tier law school. We identify the causal effect of demographic match on various student outcomes using a quasi-experimental two-way fixed effects (FE) research design that exploits rich student-by-course level administrative data. Specifically, we will estimate linear regression models that simultaneously condition on both classroom and student FE, which are similar to the preferred specification used by Fairlie, Hoffman, and Oreopoulos (2014).

Issues of representation among professionals in the legal system are timely and relevant to national policy debates for several reasons. First, longstanding racial inequities in the criminal justice system have recently come to the forefront of public policy discussions due to a series of highly publicized incidents in which unarmed black males have been killed by white police officers. The lack of representativeness of the judicial system and legal profession likely contribute to racial inequities, as research shows that black-white gaps in sentencing shrink in counties in which the number of black attorneys grows. Second, the proposed research has implications for our understanding of the gender wage gap, which is another dimension of socio-demographic inequality that has received much attention. In particular, the gender wage gap is larger among individuals with professional degrees than among individuals with college or high school diplomas, and among lawyers women earn only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men (AAUW 2015). The relatively high pay, visibility, and prestige of lawyers in the US make the legal profession important to the movement for gender wage equality. If there are adverse effects of having a male law school instructor on female law students’ academic success and course taking decisions, this might contribute to the gender wage gap among lawyers. Finally, at a more general level, there are likely numerous spillover effects of having more women and racial minorities in visible, high prestige positions in private law firms, law schools, and the judicial system.