Diversity and Networking in Law School: Are Law Students from Diverse Backgrounds Disadvantaged?

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Interpersonal networks are an important, often invisible way through which hierarchies emerge and get reproduced. Particularly, in seemingly merit-based institutions, tracing these networks could reveal the unequal structures in which diverse populations experience systemic disparities. The American legal profession offers a useful site to track these processes of inequality because it remains unequal despite its increasing heterogeneity. Law students, like many professionals, are encouraged frequently to “network,” but students from a range of diverse backgrounds – including race, gender, sexual orientation, national status, and class – may have access to differentially resourced social networks, or social capital. These “network inequalities” may impact the value of legal education across differentially structured groups of students and ultimately shape differences in student experiences and career outcomes. Whereas research on the legal profession has highlighted the importance of social capital and relationships to promote careers, less attention has been paid to the nature of networks in early professional socialization. Particularly, while the research is rife with accounts about the racial, gendered, and nationality differences during law school and then, much later, during different career stages, not enough is known about the temporal experience of law school as it feeds into the transitional period between law school and the first years of professional careers. This period is important because it tracks the emergence of a path dependency that can serve diverse professionals differently and unequally even as it structurally seems equitable. Following an earlier longitudinal network and interview study of a cohort of first-year law students across three law schools, the research aims to examine the same law students’ social networks with a range of actors to evaluate the importance of social ties for the school-to-work transition in the legal profession. The project will investigate whether observed network inequalities can account for differential job market outcomes across diverse categories of students, as well as different outcomes at the end of students’ law school careers. This innovative, longitudinal dataset will provide insight into the role that network inequalities play in shaping not only variation in experiences across different groups of students, but ultimately the role that these structural inequalities play in producing differential pathways into the legal profession. Further, given the timing of the data, it will also provide a unique opportunity to observe student experiences disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the focus of this project is inequality in law schools and early legal careers, the relevance of our findings may extend beyond the legal profession, as well, to organizations struggling with similar dynamics, including non-law professional organizations and educational organizations, for example. Specifically, these findings may provide opportunities to create meaningful interventions that may mitigate existing inequalities and facilitate more equal outcomes within the legal profession and beyond. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.