Various Articles Lead to the Same Conclusion: Women’s Experiences in Law School are Unique

Taken together, the articles reflected upon in “Hey There’s Ladies Here!” persuade the authors “that a substantial proportion of law students – many, but by no means all of them, women students – experience frustration, or alienation, or both, because of law schools’ failure to engage and develop the full range of intellectual capacities necessary for successful and responsible practice . . . legal education must be broadened and deepened to encompass neglected but important aspects of the intellectual work that legal professionals do” (Berger, et al. 1998, 1025).

“Hey There’s Ladies Here!” reflects on Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change by Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, and Jane Balin, Women in Legal Education: A Comparison of the Law School Performance and Law School Experiences of Women and Men by Linda F. Wightman, Law School Admissions Council, What Difference Does Difference Make?: The Challenge for Legal Education by Elizabeth Mertz with Wamucci Njogu and Susan Gooding, and Cultivating Intelligence: Power, Law, and the Politics of Teaching by Louise Harmon and Deborah W. Post.

Not Our Mother’s Law School (A Glimmer of Hope)

The article undertaken by students of a gender law course at Chicago-Kent School of Law entitled, “Not Our Mother’s Law School?” is especially insightful because it is an “update” to the 90’s studies and confirms that what was true then is still true now.  Additionally, previous studies have been focused on notoriously “top” law schools (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of California-Berkley), whereas this study takes place at the Chicago-Kent School of Law which is a “Tier 2” law school, and has been for quite some time.  This is relevant because when I had read the previous studies that focused on top law schools in the 1990’s, I began to hypothesize that women’s experiences in law schools were 1) different in the 90’s and more on-par with male’s experiences in the 2000’s; and 2) that women’s experiences at top law schools were different than at law schools outside of the top 20 on U.S. News & World Reports law school rankings.  This study is valuable in that the authors first reviewed nineteen works related to women’s experiences in law school, spanning from 1987 to 2006; many of which I have also read.  This provides the authors with a foundation for comparing the previous works.

Research Question 1: Had women’s experiences in law school changed since Guinier and her colleagues first undertook their study in 1994? 

Research Question 2: Were women’s experiences at Chicago-Kent different than those at more prestigious schools, especially since Chicago-Kent had admitted women since the 1890’s?

Answer: Experiences had not changed, but the performance gap has decreased (when comparing Guinier’s results of the University of Penn study to this study of Chicago-Kent)

A Forked River Runs Through Law School

Timothy Clydesdale examines the differences in race, gender, and age on law school performance and bar passage using Law School Admissions Council data (the Bar Passage Study or “BPS”) which includes a dataset of 27,478 entering law students, along with their grade point averages, LSAT scores, bar examination results (up to five attempts) and of course the race, gender, and age of those individuals.  Having this detailed information allows Clydesdale to reveal how race, gender, or age might impact one’s predisposition for success.  Moreover, by controlling for various factors (which I will explain further in this summary) Clydesdale is able to hypothesize why or why not such predispositions within a given class (race, gender, age) may appear.  For example, once Clydesdale had determined that students over the age of 30 earned inferior grades to those under 30, Clydesdale was able to pinpoint why that might be – that rather than physical age, it is that students over the age of 30 have a greater likelihood to experience life events during the 1L year which hinder the student’s success, restrictions on study time (due to family responsibilities and demands), and a greater chance of being impacted by physical illness.  Nevertheless, there is a “4% gap in passage rates between those bar examinees who began law school at age 30 or older and their younger counterparts” (Clydesdale 2004, 713).  Clydesdale determines that law school grades correspond directly to bar passage rates; so knowing that law students over thirty are more likely to earn lower grades, it is not surprising that this also translates to lower bar passage rates.  Most importantly, Clydesdale sheds light on the disparity between the groups and even the disparity in six-categories of law schools.