It's always a pleasure to see one's research replicated and extended, so I read with interest law professor Aaron Taylor's article, “Diversity as a Law School Survival Strategy,” which investigates the increasing minority presence in the country's law schools. I drew attention to the disproportionate drop in white law students in late 2013, and Taylor's results largely validate that article's findings.

Taylor welcomes increasing law school diversity as a hopeful bellwether for the disproportionately white profession, arguing in an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education last year that law schools should embrace minority applicants even when bothersome LSAT scores and questionable undergraduate credentials raise red flags. Taylor maintains that such measurements don't perfectly predict their potential lawyering abilities. However, Taylor's own research in “Survival Strategy” helps show that diversity among lawyers is unlikely to come about because the law schools enrolling minorities feature poor job outcomes.

Helpfully separating law schools into quintiles based on their 2010 entering classes' median LSAT scores, Taylor finds that schools in the fifth quintile, which have the lowest LSAT medians, are enrolling higher proportions of minority students. Taking that information one step further, Taylor's quintiles can be used to explore the LSAT's relationship to student outcomes, namely academic attrition, bar passage rates and employment results for the class of 2013. These measurements strongly imply that students at increasingly minority-populated law schools will not meaningfully enter the legal profession, contradicting Taylor's assertion that LSAT scores “have little to no value in predicting longer-term outcomes, like subsequent grades, bar passage or professional success.”