According to figures released last month, there are 19 Black students in the first-year class at Harvard Law School, down from 43 in last year’s entering class. You have to go back to the 1960s to find so few Black students in the entering class. In the years since 1970, the number of first years, or 1Ls, who were Black has ranged from 50 to 70.
David Wilkins, a brilliant Black professor at Harvard and the faculty director of the school’s Center on the Legal Profession, noted that “this is the lowest number of Black entering first-year students since 1965” and that “this obviously has a lot to do with the chilling effect created by that decision” — that is, the decision last year by the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case where Harvard College was a defendant, barring affirmative action in university admissions.
It is a major step backward for a school that has produced some of the leading Black lawyers in America, a step backward that dramatically affects not only Black students, but the quality of education for all Harvard law students. Diversity makes a huge difference in what happens in a law school classroom. And a Harvard degree opens doors to a career in law that, fairly or not, are just not the same for graduates of lower-tier law schools.
I spent three years as a student at Harvard Law, and 10 as a member of the faculty. The Black students in my time at Harvard included everyone from future civil rights leaders like Charles Ogletree and John Payton and Christopher Edley Jr. to political leaders like Barack and Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. They made a difference — in the classroom, on the Law Review, and in American life and law.
