Ming Zhu, a recent Harvard Law grad and current fellow with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, just published a study on the tenure-track of minority law professors. She concludes in An Empirical Study of Race and Law School Hiring that while minorities are more likely to be hired, they are also more likely to be locked out of top tier posts.

From NLJ:

Zhu sought to figure out whether race plays a role in law school hiring. Law schools have been under pressure since the 1980s to boost the number of minority faculty members, which often is seen as a key to increasing minority student enrollment. In turn, higher minority enrollment is a cornerstone of increasing diversity throughout the legal profession.

Zhu analyzed data on 889 candidates:

Of the 889 candidates, 191 — just more than 21% — were hired by the following academic year, according to Zhu’s study. Minorities made up nearly 20% of those who were hired, but Asians, blacks and Latinos were all more likely than whites to be hired. Asians topped the list of successful hires, with nearly 43% of candidates landing a position. About 29% of Latino candidates got jobs, while slightly more than 24% of black candidates were hired. By comparison, about 21% of white applicants landed positions.

Zhu concludes:

“Taken alone, these results seem like a good sound-byte for the argument that minorities are being preferred in faculty hiring,” the report says. It notes, however, that without more information on qualifications, it’s impossible to know if the hiring decisions were a result of affirmative action or a stronger minority applicant pool.

The picture gets a bit murkier when it comes to where minority applicants were offered jobs. “Examining the placement of the hired candidates, it is immediately clear that minorities do considerably worse than non-minorities in terms of placement,” the study reads.

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