Dean: The Law School Hiring Market Undervalues Women, Minorities

Diverse Education Op-Ed: The Law School Hiring Market Undervalues Women, Minorities, by Steven Dean (Boston University; Google Scholar):

The latest attack on efforts to support diversity comes in the form of a lawsuit targeting Northwestern University’s law school. The suit accuses the school’s faculty and administration of snubbing high-profile white male applicants. The 30-page complaint gets so many facts wrong that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Since the plaintiffs decided to make the “high-demand, low-supply field” of tax law an example, I’d like to acknowledge one undeniably true statement: there are very few minority tax law professors. That is particularly obvious at the sort of elite institutions the suit emphasizes. Neither Stanford nor the University of Chicago have any. Northwestern has one among its nine residential tax faculty.

Inevitably, the document pairs its lonely truth with an almost laughable falsehood, stating that tax law scholars who are female are “difficult or impossible to find.” There are, in fact, lots of women tax law professors. The complaint fails to mention that one of the targets of the lawsuit is a woman tax law professor. ...

The real problem with academic hiring is not discrimination against white men. Nor is it the odious racism directed at scholars like [Dorothy] Brown. The true obstacle to building diverse law school faculties is often nothing more than old habits.

Several years ago, I led the premiere tax law graduate program at NYU. One of my proudest accomplishments, while there, was persuading them to stop calling the leading pipeline for tax law professors the Tax AAP (Acting Assistant Professors, pronounced “ape”). Just in time to prevent a Black woman from holding the title, the program was rechristened the Visiting Assistant Professor of Tax Law Program. ...

What the lawsuit fails to appreciate is that great law faculties do not achieve that simply by chasing the same top scholars. They often play a version of Moneyball, the data-driven approach that revolutionized first baseball and then the rest of professional sports. Law schools thrive by buying low and selling high, finding scholars that the law school hiring market undervalues. Thanks to the combination of the bias directed at non-white and women law scholars and old habits like the Tax AAP, many of those bargains will be women and minorities.

Above the Law, Suit Alleges Anti-White Bias In Tax Law Hiring Despite Virtually All Tax Lawyers Being White