Does Blind Review See Race?*
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
In a comment to my earlier post suggesting that law review editors should seek out work from underrepresented demographic groups, my co-blogger Dave Hoffman asked an excellent question: Would blind review remedy these concerns? It seems to me that the answer here is complicated. Blind review would probably be an improvement on balance, but could still suffer from — err, blind spots. Here are a few reasons why.
The paradigmatic case for the merits of blind review comes from a well-known study of musician hiring, published about a decade ago by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse in the American Economic Review. Goldin and Rouse gathered data on symphony auditions, and found that blind auditions — that is, ones which concealed the gender of the auditioning musician — resulted in a significantly higher proportion of women musicians auditioning successfully. As Rouse commented,
“This country’s top symphony orchestras have long been alleged to discriminate against women, and others, in hiring. Our research suggests both that there has been differential treatment of women and that blind auditions go a long way towards resolving the problem.”
The Goldin-Rouse study shows that blind review can be a useful tool in combating bias. Would a similar review system work in the law review context?
Well, maybe. Read the rest of this post »
February 18, 2013 at 7:11 pm
Tags: blind review, gender, law reviews, Race, unconscious bias
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Race
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In Defense of Law Review Affirmative Action
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
As you may have seen, the new Scholastica submission service allows law reviews to collect demographic information from authors. A flurry of blog posts has recently cropped up in response (including some in this space); as far as I can tell, they range from negative to negative to kinda-maybe-negative to negative to still negative. The most positive post I’ve seen comes from Michelle Meyer at the Faculty Lounge, who discusses whether Scholastica’s norms are like symposium selection norms, and in the process implies that Scholastica’s model might be okay. Michael Mannheimer at Prawfs also makes a sort of lukewarm defense that editors were probably doing this anyway.
But is it really the case that law review affirmative action would be a bad thing? Read the rest of this post »
February 16, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Tags: gender, law reviews, Race, scholastica, unconscious bias
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Race
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Affirmative Action and Merit
posted by Caroline Mala Corbin
The Supreme Court is set next week to hear the affirmative action case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. Many people are troubled by affirmative action because they are convinced that it means less qualified (non-white) students are admitted over more qualified (white) ones. To them, that just seems unfair. (One may wonder how it compares to the unfairness of a public education system that generally offers much better schooling to suburban (white) students.)
In any case, how reliable is their measurement of merit? As an initial matter, if diversity in itself is valuable, then the ability to add to it makes you more qualified then someone who cannot. Of course, what people usually have in mind are test scores, grades, and recommendations. Yet do the best grades and recommendations, for example, necessarily go to the best students? Studies on unconscious biases suggest the answer may be no. Take the most recent entry in a long series of studies revealing that identical qualifications are evaluated differently based on the race or sex of a candidate. In this randomized double-blind Yale study, science professors were asked to evaluate men’s and women’s resumes. The resumes were exactly the same except that some bore a man’s name (John) and some bore a woman’s (Jennifer). Both men and women rated the male candidates higher, and were willing to pay them more. Again, these were the exact same resumes. It is not a huge leap to think the same kind unconscious bias regularly occurs in classrooms across the country — and this is only one way that unconscious bias might lead to unfair assessments.
Granted, affirmative action may be a crude way to compensate for structural inequality and unconscious biases. But realistically, what are the alternatives?
October 3, 2012 at 5:24 pm
Tags: affirmative action, Fisher, Race, unconscious bias
Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Education, Uncategorized
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