Harvard Law School’s mission statement offers a glimpse at the central tenets of the institution’s academic experience: “The unique strength of our community is that it brings together, from around the world, so many exceptionally talented people of different backgrounds, lived experiences, interests, ambitions, approaches, methodologies, and perspectives.”
However, after the number of Black enrollees in the 2024 incoming Harvard Law School (HLS) class hit a 60-year low following the Supreme Court’s 2023 overturn of affirmative action, onlookers are questioning how HLS plans to uphold its commitment to unparalleled opportunity, equal access, and excellence in every dimension for all individuals.
According to data submitted to the American Bar Association, HLS’s 2024 first-year law school students (JD1) Black student enrollment was only 19 students out of a total of 461 first years. This stat stands in stark contrast to the 2023 incoming class, which had 43 Black JD1’s. The number of Hispanic students also decreased from 63 to 32. Meanwhile, the number of enrolled Asians in the incoming class rose from 103 to 132 students. In an institution that is known for educating some of America’s most renowned Black lawyers, including former President Barack Obama, Civil Rights Movement leader Charles Hamilton Houston, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, many are concerned about the future of representation in the legal academic space and profession.
The Harvard Independent spoke with HLS Lester Kissel Professor of Law David B. Wilkins ’77,
University of Los Angeles California Jesse Dukeminier Professorship in Law holder Richard Sander ’78, and Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness in the two Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, to shed some light on the causes, implications, and future impacts of these numbers.
SFFA and the HLS Drop in Black Enrollment
American admissions practices across all institutions of higher education have used race-conscious affirmative action since the early 1960s. However, the focus on academic integration shifted with the elimination of racial preferences in admissions in the 2023 Supreme Court cases, SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC.
In a landmark decision, SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC struck down race-conscious affirmative action, declaring it unconstitutional. After four decades of universities using race-based preferences when admitting minority applicants, this decision naturally spurred controversy.
“I was very disappointed in the Supreme Court decision. I think that it ignored fifty years of evidence of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the legal profession, ” Wilkins confessed. “It’s always been true that your background and experience has played into the admissions process. Always.”
These thoughts were compounded by Wilkins’ initial fear that the outcomes of the SFFA lawsuit would erase the progress made in representation in legal education and the profession as a whole over the past few decades. “Harvard is a far more interesting and exciting and excellent place than it has ever been because of its diversity,” Wilkins expressed.
Arcidiacono offered a different perspective. “I think that universities have been very dishonest in how race is being used in their admissions practices. If we become more transparent, then we can get a lot of good things to come out of the ruling, ” he explained.
Sander presented a similar positive outlook on the Supreme Court’s decision. “If the school is not using preferences, that, in essence, increases the value of their credential. Because it means, ‘you got in the same way everybody else did. You’re not like a special case. We don’t need to think of you as a beneficiary of a double standard.’” To Sander, that makes admissions to elite institutions “more attractive.”
To substantiate these preliminary thoughts, Sander and his colleagues sought to investigate the impact of the SFFA rulings on law school admissions. After collecting and analyzing data across approximately 96,000 applicants applying to primarily elite law schools, their unpublished research offers quantitative insights into the impact of the Supreme Court decisions.
“In the 2021 and 2022 admissions cycles, law schools were using preferences very similar to those they had been using for decades,” Sander explained. However, by 2023, his study showed that racial preferences generally declined across 80 of the top law schools.
This consistency drastically changed by 2024. Sander’s findings demonstrated that, on average, there was a one-third decline in the amount of preferences given to African American students at elite law schools. Yet, there was a particularly striking decline at Harvard. According to Sander’s data, there was no clear evidence that HLS was using racial preferences at all.
“Harvard had a target on it” due to their involvement in the Supreme Court lawsuits, Arcidiacono explained. According to Arcidiacono, they had to assume the most scrutiny and thus strictly complied with this overturn on affirmative action.
It is important to note that, at the undergraduate level, these rulings did not have a vast impact on minority enrollment, as seen from the Independent’s prior investigation into the Harvard College Class of 2028. However, “affirmative action has always been bigger the higher up you go,” Arcidiacono explained. “It doesn’t surprise me that you see a bigger drop” when looking at the HLS JD1 class demographics.
“Harvard must have understood that if they didn’t use preferences, they would have a pretty substantial drop. They may have been surprised it wasn’t larger than it was,” Sander stated. However, Wilkins felt that “the drop is greater than anyone expected,” partly due to the lack of change in undergraduate admissions, and the decline was more significant at HLS than across peer institutions.
In response to these conflicting opinions, Wilkins asked a critical question: “How does the school react to this?” This thought is especially relevant when considering how far the legal profession has come over the past few decades regarding diversity and racial representation.
The Legal Field, Race, and Law School Admissions
Throughout the early-to-mid twentieth century, the legal field was relatively homogenous in the context of race, religion, and gender. Wilkins explained, “Prior to the mid-1960s, anybody could be a lawyer, as long as you were a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant man of means.”
Statistics from the era corroborate these statements. According to estimations cited by an article written by Professor John T. Baker of the Indiana University School of Law and Yale Law School graduate Jerome Davis, the number of Black lawyers in the United States before 1960 was approximately 1,500 out of the 300,000 lawyers in America. Representation in the justice sector was transformed in the late twentieth century.
In response to the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and shifts in public perception of minority populations, the late 1960s opened the doors for under-represented populations. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission explains in a study on diversity in law firms that, in 1975, African Americans accounted for 2.3% of employed lawyers, and by 2002, 4.4%. By the twenty-first century, data from the American Bar Association’s 2020 Profile of the Legal Profession illustrates how the proportion of Black lawyers in America had dramatically increased, standing at 11.4% by 2010 and 14.1% by 2020.
In the context of HLS, the first Black law student was in the entering Class of 1962. However, diversity in enrollment classes grew in the coming years, and from 1965 to 2022, there were between 40-60 Black students in almost every entering class. Similar trends were seen across all the elite law institutions until the elimination of race-based preferences in admissions.
The Future of Admissions, Legal Education, and the Legal Profession
The influence of the Supreme Court’s overturn of affirmative action will vary across different institutions, especially at HLS. “You really have to distinguish between what happens at an individual school like Harvard and what happens in the system as a whole,” Sander noted. He also explained that non-elite institutions only saw a minimal drop in Black, Latino, and other minority student enrollment numbers. In contrast, the impact of the banning of racial preferences in admissions at elite law schools depends on institutional compliance.
“What are my competitors going to do?” is the question that Arcidiacono believes elite law schools like Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and more will be asking. Arcidiacono predicts that institutions will shift their adherence to the elimination of race-based affirmative action in upcoming admission cycles depending on the extent to which their peers conform to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Both Arcidiacono and Sander also suggest that compliance with the SFFA rulings, and thus changes in Black student enrollment for future law school admissions cycles, will change with our new executive branch.
“Under Biden, the only way you’re ever going to get compliance would be through more court cases. With the Trump administration, that may be different,” Arcidiacono stated. Sander concurs, explaining that Trump’s “justice department and education department might start suing schools that appear not to have reduced racial preferences. There may also be private litigation against law schools.”
With these questions regarding compliance in mind, Arcidiacono clarifies that academic institutions nationwide need to discover an optimal balance between using racial preferences in admissions while still ensuring their enrollment classes are intellectually and culturally compatible. “As you increase the preferences more and more, the benefits you may get from diversity become smaller and smaller, primarily because you’re ending up admitting students who don’t match as well with the characteristics with the other students,” he claimed.
Wilkins offered a different perspective on the direction of future law school admissions. In the context of HLS, according to Wilkins, the law school’s first-year classes consist of around 80 people. With this shift in racial representation, instead of having around seven or eight Black students in each lecture, there now may be one or two. Wilkins argued that this would put “tremendous pressure” on the few students who are there. “We know that when people are in an extreme minority, whoever they are, it is much more difficult for them to realize their full potential and to contribute freely because there is a spotlight on them,” he explained.
Extrapolating this to the larger legal profession, Wilkins uses history to explain his concerns. “Harvard has educated more Black lawyers than any other law school in the United States with the exception of Howard Law School and perhaps another historically Black institution.” Therefore, to Wilkins, to have the number of Black students fall to the lowest level in any other entering class since 1965 “is not just a disaster for the Black students who are not enrolled, it’s a disaster for our profession.”
Wilkins claims that such richness in the law school student body “has played a huge role in bringing not just diversity…[but] bringing excellence, outstanding achievements at the highest levels in every aspect of our society.”
Ultimately, it is going to take a few admissions cycles to get more consistency. What it stabilizes at will be unclear, but, to Arcidiacono, the number of enrolled Black students at elite institutions “will certainly be less than what it was.”
“The path to a racially just and fair, race-neutral society is long and winding,” Sander added.
However, Wilkins makes it clear that diversity in race and all other contexts is “a fundamental part of education” and, therefore, must be preserved.
Sara Kumar ’27 (sjkumar@college.harvard.edu) is the News Editor for the Harvard Independent.