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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIn Entire Court Term, Justices See 1 Black Lawyer
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 12, 2013 at 7:55 AM ET
WASHINGTON (AP) In roughly 75 hours of arguments at the Supreme Court since October, only one African-American lawyer appeared before the justices, and for just over 11 minutes.
The numbers were marginally better for Hispanic lawyers. Four of them argued for a total of 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Women were better represented, accounting for just over 17 percent of the arguments before the justices.
In an era when three women, a Hispanic and an African-American sit on the court and white men constitute a bare majority of the nine justices, the court is more diverse than the lawyers who argue before it.
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/05/12/us/politics/ap-us-supreme-court-diversity.html
Quantess
(27,630 posts)along with the increasing uncertainty of a law degree paying off... that might explain a lot.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Just-us.
Igel
(35,383 posts)Women are down a bit from their average proportions with that level of expertise, but only a few percentage points. Probably close to the margin of error.
Blacks are a bit underrepresented before the Court, but not that much underrepresented. Latinos are also within the margin of error, and it would be interesting to see the bios of the Latinos. The one black was the son of immigrants, which, oddly, is exactly what I expected when I read the OP. (Granted, Irish and Nigerian didn't come to mind, but "son" and "immigrant" did).
Then there's the idea that the individual clients are out to win their case and will pick who they think is best. If there's a doubt about a lawyer's skills, whether that's based on university, law firm, accent, height, color of hair, XY or XX chromosomes, or skin color is a personal decision (or a decision made by a few people representing an organization).
What's actually out of whack is the SCOTUS, but the NYT doesn't see that because for them change is immediate and compelled. SCOTUS would have the same sort of race/sex skew if they were chosen randomly from sets of equally qualified people. That the Supreme Court is skewed as it is shows that presidents have looked and decided that skin color and genitals were every bit important as qualifying factors as other legal prerequisites like political views.
New grads from law schools still show skews in various directions, but it'll take more than my lifetime for those particular skewings to become dominant in the profession. Some changes are done by fiat, and are essentially speech acts. We think of those as the real changes. However, even change by fiat takes time to implement, and when you're talking about a change that's the accumulation of a millions of individual decisions--choice of major, decision to go to grad school, decision where to apply, decisions by employers or hire or promote, decisions by customers to patronize or avoid a law firm--it's not a change you're going to be able to rush.