Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

I've got a lot to cover this week, so I've got short takes on a number of interesting developments. First, Harvard Law School has partnered with an organization to enroll more military veterans. Next, the Law School Admission Council has reinstated limits on the number of times people can take the LSAT. Then I'm looking at SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito's recollection of taking Con Law from Yale professor Charles Reich, who died last week. Finally, I'm looking at racial discrimination on law school faculties and whether the legal academy has a pervasive problem on its hands. 

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

A Military to Law School Pipeline

Here's some cool news. Harvard Law School has become the first law school to join VetLink, a group of top colleges and graduate programs actively seeking to increase their veteran enrollment. VetLink is an initiative of Service to School—a nonprofit that aims to help veterans get into those schools by offering free application counseling and peer guidance to veterans. (It was co-founded by Anna Ivey, a former admissions dean at the University of Chicago Law School.) Until recently, VetLink focused on undergraduate programs. But the George Washington University School of Political Management and Harvard Law are now the first two graduate programs to join the initiative. Here's what Harvard's assistant dean for admissions, Kristi Jobsen, had to say about the new collaboration: “Today, we are proud to host one of the largest communities of U.S. military veterans of any law school in the country. Harvard Law School is excited to form this new partnership with Service to School, and to add the VetLink program to our many efforts to connect with veterans thinking about a career in the law.” So just how is Harvard doing when it comes to veteran enrollment? Well, last year vets numbered 45 out of about 2,000 students. That figure is poised to grow, with 20 more veterans expected in the incoming class.

And this isn't just about providing opportunity for those who have served our country. What I frequently hear from law school folks is that veterans generally make strong law students and lawyers because, on the whole, they tend to be older and have work experience, they're disciplined, they already know how to work in teams and they tend to be strong leaders. Those are qualities not always present in the typical 20-something law student. Will other law schools follow Harvard's lead and jump on the VetLink train?

LSAT Limits Are Back

The LSAT will soon be given 10 times a year, but that doesn't mean you can become a serial test taker. The Law School Admission Council recently announced that it's bringing back limits on how many times you can take the test. The council in late 2017 did away with a rule limiting people from taking the LSAT not more than three times in a two-year period. But the council recently informed LSAT registrants of new limits.

➤➤People can take the test up to three times in a testing year, which runs from June through May.

➤➤It can be taken as many as five times during the current testing year and five past testing years.

➤➤You can take it no more than seven times total.

The policy is forward looking, and no tests taken before September 2019 will count toward those totals. The limits makes sense to me. The move strikes me as a reasonable cap that will prevent people from going overboard in trying to maximize their scores. I've spoken to a few people over the years who have told me that they enjoy taking standardized tests, and I'd hate to the LSAT become a hobby for those outliers, now that it's given far more often than before.

Charles Reich: AWOL Con Law Prof

You may have caught one of the many obituaries of author and former Yale Law School professor Charles Reich that followed his June 15 death. Reich, who was 91, was best known for his 1970 book “The Greening of America”—which was something of a love letter to the 1960s counterculture of which he was a part. It sounds to me like Reich led a very interesting life. (He was in Berkeley for the famed 1967 Summer of Love and also taught the likes of Hillary and Bill Clinton at Yale.) One of the more amusing things I've read about Reich this week was this excerpt from an interview conservative writer Bill Kristol did with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was assigned to Reich's Constitutional Law section while a student at Yale in the early 1970s. Lets just say Alito wasn't a huge fan. After his attempts to transfer into the other Con Law section—taught by Robert Bork, no less!—Alito resigned himself. In his recollection, Reich mentioned just a single Supreme Court case over the course of the class and instead spent the bulk of time trying to convince students that their altruistic reasons for going to law school in the first place were bunk.

But here's the part that really got me. In Alito's telling, Reich warned students from the beginning that he may need to up and leave for San Francisco without notice. (He was apparently going through some personal turmoil at the time.) Sure enough, when his class returned from Thanksgiving, there was a note on bulletin board informing them that the professor had left for San Francisco and class was over for the semester. Somehow I don't think that would fly today. Any professor attempting that kind of mid-semester disappearing act would get torn apart by Above the Law…

Do Law Schools Have a Faculty Race Discrimination Problem?

Last week got me thinking about racial discrimination against minority law professors, and whether that problem is particularly prevalent at law schools. I don't know the answer to that question—I don't track racial discrimination lawsuits in business, medical schools or other graduate programs, so I don't have a sense of how often this issue surfaces in those contexts. But two such cases at law schools were in the news last week. First the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia revived Kemit Mawakana's lawsuit against the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law. Mawakana, a black man, first sued the school—which is part of a historically black college and university—in 2014, claiming he was denied tenure and later terminated because of his race, and that the school's faculty is dominated by white professors. Then University of Idaho law professor Shaakirrah Sanders last week sued alleging racial and gender discrimination. Sanders, a black woman, is tenured. But her suit claims the school's former dean assigned classes she wanted to teach to white professors instead, and never even considered her for available associate dean positions. We've seen other racial discriminations suits arise at South Texas College of Law—Houston, Atlanta's John Marshall Law School and DePaul University College of Law, just to name a few.

As I said earlier, I don't have a handle on whether racial discrimination is more prevalent among law school faculties. But one would think (hope?) that law school administrators would be especially sensitive to racial discrimination based on nothing more than their familiarity with the law. I also think that law professors, for that same reason, are more likely to sue. They know their legal rights better than, say, a business school professor, and I'd venture to guess they are more comfortable bringing a lawsuit. I'm not sure where this leaves us, but I'll be keeping an eye on the issue.

Extra Credit Reading

Former Loyola University Chicago School of Law Dean David Yellen abruptly vacated the Marist College presidency after three years, amid murky circumstances.

A student at Florida A&M University College of Law has sued, claiming she was sexually assaulted and harassed by an employee in the admissions office, and that officials failed to properly investigate her allegations.

The American Association of University Professors sanctioned Vermont Law School for stripping tenure from the bulk of its faculty in 2018.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here.

I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]