Photo: Shutterstock

The percentage of women clinical faculty at law schools nearly doubled over the past 30 years, but progress has been much slower among minority clinicians, a new report has found.

Minorities now compose 20% of all full-time law school clinicians—up from 9% in 1981. By contrast, the percentage of women teaching clinics full time increased from 33% to 62% during that same time period, according to a new study of clinician faculty demographics conducted by a committee of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA).

Those findings suggest that law schools should take steps to reach out to and recruit minority clinicians, while at the same time ensuring that women are not disproportionately clustered in clinical positions—which lack the same status and pay as doctrinal positions, authors of the study assert.

"I think we were surprised by the lack of more significant progress over time—although anecdotally most of us, just looking around the institutions where we work, should not have been surprised given that we've all been working within law schools and clinics," said Caitlin Barry, a clinical professor at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law and one of the article's seven authors. "I would not say that, on the whole, the findings are positive."

CLEA established its Committee for Faculty Equity and Inclusion, which conducted the study, to "draw attention to the crisis of diversity among clinical faculties, and to urge law schools to take proactive steps to remedy this longstanding failure."

The new study builds upon the findings of a 2000 law review article by Rutgers law professor Jon Dubin that tracked the demographics of clinical faculty since the 1980s. According to the new article, titled "The Diversity Imperative Revisited: Racial and Gender Inclusion in Clinical Law Faculty" that appears in the most recent edition of the Clinical Law Review, progress on the racial diversity front has been "limited" over the past 20 years.

The percentage of black clinical professors has never exceeded 7%, a high that it first reached in 1999. Similarly, Latino and Latina professors make up just 5% of clinicians, which is the same threshold they represented in 1981. The one minority group that has seen a sizable increase in its representation among clinical faculty is Asian Americans, up from 2% in 1999 to 6% in 2017, the study found. In all, nearly 8 out of 10 full-time clinic professors today are white.

That's a problem for numerous reasons, the authors say. Research shows that women and minority students perform better in classes taught by diverse faculty, and that minority professors provide key mentorship to students. And since clinical faculty often dictate the communities their programs serve, maintaining diversity among their ranks also helps ensure that clinical programs are assisting a broad array of clients.

"An inclusive faculty is vital to the teaching and service mission of clinical education, plays a key role in student recruitment, retention, academic achievement and professional development, and enhances the viewpoints that will influence clinic dockets, scholarship, and pedagogy," the article reads.

But there is reason to be cautious about funneling more women and minorities into clinical positions—particularly since recent diversity gains have coincided with a decline in the number of tenure-track positions and an increasing reliance on faculty with short-term contracts and adjuncts. Thus, today's more diverse clinical faculty may not enjoy the same level of job status and protections as their predecessors, the article warns.

"Our wariness is that if progress is only made around positions with lower status, lower compensation, and fewer benefits, is that really progress in the bigger picture?" Barry said. "The concern we have around the data regarding women was just that that progress has not been made across the legal academy. If it's only in the clinics, then we're concerned that women are being more highly concentrated in positions that offer less protections."