Dean shines spotlight on law school enrollment

By John Minnis Legal News It isn't often the dean of a small Midwest law school gets equal billing in the New York Times with a Columbia Law School professor. But that was the case recently when John Nussbaumer, associate dean of Thomas M. Cooley Law School's Auburn Hill campus, was quoted extensively in the Times piece, "Law School Admissions Lag Among Minorities," by Tamar Lewin. The Jan. 6 story cited a study by Columbia law professor Conrad Johnson that found that while the number of seats for first-year law students had increased from 1993 to 2008, the number of black and Mexican-American law students had declined during the same period -- even though college grade-point averages and LSAT scores among those groups had improved. "What's happening, as the American population becomes more diverse," Nussbaumer told the Times, "is that the lawyer corps and judges are remaining predominantly white." Nussbaumer has been studying minority law school enrollment for some time and has become somewhat of an expert. In November, he was asked to give a presentation on minority law school enrollment at the 40th anniversary celebration of Ronald H. Brown's graduation from St. John's School of Law in New York City. Brown was the first black Secretary of Commerce and the first black chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Cooley dean pointed out that 58 percent of all African-American law applicants were "shut out" -- i.e., denied admission -- by all ABA-accredited law schools in 2008. He cites three top reasons why so many minorities are shut out by law schools. First is the quality of K-16 education available in the urban areas where most minorities attend school. "It's not a surprise that most of these students struggle on the LSAT," Nussbaumer says. "Plenty of minority students do perform well on LSATs, but as a whole they tend to be from (struggling) school systems." Second is the "elitist arms race" by law school recruiters. "Law schools set their requirements based on U.S. News & World Report rankings instead of (the applicant's) reasonable chance of success," Nussbaumer says. He believes too much weight is put on LSAT scores in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Law schools' admission standards are too often based on "Where do we want to rank in U.S. News and how elite do we want to be?" Nussbaumer says. There does seem to be a correlation between law school rankings and LSAT scores. (See accompanying chart, "Law School Rankings: U.S. News & World Report" on front page.) Another component of the U.S. News rankings is selectivity: The lower the acceptance rate - i.e., the more applicants who are turned away -- the higher the law school's ranking. Interestingly, though, attending a top-ranked law school does not appreciatively improve one's chances of passing the bar. Wayne State University Law School graduates, for example, pass the bar at a higher rate than do their peers at Yale University. Nussbaumer's school, Cooley, has one of the most generous of LSAT requirements and the one of the highest acceptance rates among all law schools. While Cooley's overall bar passage rate, according to U.S. News & World Report, was just 80.5 percent, Nussbaumer boasts that since the Auburn Hills campus opened in 2002, 95 percent of his students pass the bar in two attempts and 83 percent on the first try. Cooley-Auburn Hills' class of July 2009, for example, entered with a 25th percentile LSAT score of 144, compared with University of Detroit Mercy School of Law's 25th percentile score of 148 and Wayne State Law School's 153. Yet, three years later, Cooley-Auburn Hills' first-time bar exam pass rate was 89 percent, the same as Wayne State's, while UDM's was 85 percent. Krystal Johnson, a May 2007 graduate from Cooley's Auburn Hills campus and now a law clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Victoria A. Roberts, Eastern District of Michigan, is an example of the disconnect between LSAT scores and the ability to succeed. Johnson, a Southfield-Lathrup High School and Ohio State University graduate, received a 141 on her first LSAT exam and a 142 on her second attempt. "I applied to every law school in Michigan," she says, "and Cooley was the only law school that accepted me." Cooley was a challenge, she admits, but she found the school's methods worked for her. "While the professors challenged me," she says, "I had a wonderful support system. The professors' doors were always open, and I took advantage of that. My relationship with Cooley faculty continues today." Johnson graduated in the top 6 percent of her class with a 3.49 GPA. She received awards for the Best Brief in Moot Court, Leadership Achievement and Distinguished Student. She was associate editor of the Law Review, was a member of the Grade Appeals Board, served as a Graduation Marshal, Cooley Ambassador and a research assistant for the Innocence Project, and was vice president of the Black Law Students Association. In 2008, Cooley topped the list for African-American enrollment among all ABA-accredited law schools with 378 students, according to the 2010 Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools. Further, Cooley ranked second in total minority graduates (937) among all ABA-accredited law schools for the years 2005-2010. Some 525 of Cooley's graduates for those years were African-American. One of those recent Cooley graduates is Aaron Burrell, another Southfield-Lathrup High School graduate. He earned a political science degree in African-American studies from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. On his first attempt on the LSAT, he met Cooley's admittance threshold and enrolled at the Auburn Hills campus. "I was attracted to Cooley's accelerated two-year program," he says. "I went to an open house. It seemed like they provided a good quality, practical education." A law school's ranking was not that important to Burrell and, in his case, 172nd-ranked Cooley worked out just fine. After interning with Dickinson Wright last summer, he has already been offered a job there. He would like to specialize in commercial litigation. U.S. News & World Report has its own diversity ranking of law schools. (See accompanying chart.) U.S. News's diversity index is based on the total proportion of minority students (not counting foreign students) and the mix of racial and ethnic groups on campus. Law schools that enroll a large proportion of students from one ethnic minority group do not score as high on the U.S. News index. The University of Michigan ranked the highest among Michigan law schools in U.S. News's diversity ranking. Cooley was No. 2 in the state on the U.S. News diversity scale. Abe Barlaskar, a second-year law student at Cooley's Auburn Hills campus, is the son of Bangladeshi immigrants. His father was a dishwasher and a factory worker and now drives a taxi. Born in Detroit, Abe Barlaskar graduated from Hamtramck High School and was accepted at the University of Michigan, where he found himself unprepared for college. "Because I was not adequately prepared for the rigor and pace of a university-level education," he says, "I struggled, taking all the wrong classes and not knowing how to study." Ultimately, he did graduate and easily fell within Cooley's admission guidelines with a respectable 151 on his LSAT. Cooley was the only school Barlaskar sought. The school's main attractions for him were its night and weekend classes, 1L class sequences starting in January, May and September and Cooley's offer of a 35 percent scholarship. He started as a part-time student and is now in the top 1 percent of his class. "Because of all the resources and accessibility to professors," he says, "I did very well." At the end of his third semester, Barlaskar clerked with the Oakland County Friend of the Court. Then, through the Wolverine Bar Association, he applied for a summer internship with U.S. District Court Judge Marianne O. Battani, Eastern District of Michigan. He also landed a second summer job as a full-time, paid clerk with DTE Energy's legal department. His summer experiences gave Barlaskar confidence, which apparently showed during interviews with big firm recruiters during an on-campus job fair. He received several callbacks and sat through numerous follow-up interviews. With the help of Dean Nussbaumer, the Wolverine Bar Association and a contact at Plunkett Cooney -- his "first choice" of firms -- Barlaskar secured a summer associate position at Plunkett Cooney's Bloomfield Hills office beginning in May. "I have opportunities I would never have dreamed of if it weren't for Cooley Law School," he says. Contrary to Barlaskar's experience, the third reason why the odds are stacked against minority students getting into law school, according to Nussbaumer, is the habit of judges and law firms hiring mostly from the highest-ranked firms on the U.S. News & World Report list. "Judges and law firms reinforce the rankings by only interning graduates from those most elite schools," he says, "particularly the bigger and better firms. "When you roll those three things together, two-thirds of all African-Americans never get the chance to prove they can succeed." The situation is troubling in that by 2050, the majority of Americans will be citizens of color, Nussbaumer says, yet today only 10 percent of all lawyers in America are people of color. He foresees a time when the majority of clients will be African-, Hispanic- and Asian-American and most lawyers and judges are not. Nussbaumer fears such upside-down representation will create a "crisis in confidence" in the justice system. "Appearances matter," he says. But what is to be done? Improved K-12 education: "That's obviously one part of it," Nussbaumer says. Also, law schools have to set LSAT score requirements at a level that allows for a reasonable prospect of success and not merely elitist. And, lastly, judges and law firms have to hire minority juris doctors. "A lot of people talk about diversity," Nussbaumer says, "but law firms and judges have to at least consider graduates from all law schools." As dean of a small law school, Nussbaumer particularly dislikes bigger schools poaching his minority students once they have reached their second or third year. "It's frustrating," he says, "when we get them up to speed and better schools go after them." Since passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative in 2006, Michigan universities cannot consider race or ethnicity when admitting students. "We do not practice any affirmative action at Cooley," Nussbaumer says. "We set standards at the lowest level that still provides a reasonable chance of success." He maintains the problem with minorities not getting into law schools is not racism but rather elitism. "It's like an elite country club," he says, "except it's based on LSAT scores." All minority students want is an opportunity to prove themselves. "'We want a chance,'" Nussbaumer says is the rejoinder of would-be minority law students. "'If you give us the chance, we will prove we can do it.'" Published: Mon, Feb 1, 2010

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