This mini-thread has gotten out of hand, so I'm paring down the quoting to just answer something that I think is at the heart of it. Forgive me if I've taken out too much, and let me know if you think I've missed something important.
This is the part I wonder about. I've noticed that undergrad and law schools tend to be very intellectually lazy in the admissions process, at least compared to the graduate admissions programs I'm familiar with. Even though what I'm about to say is anecdotal, I've seen that laziness reflected in the makeup of the student bodies. In all my time in and around Penn and Princeton, I only met two minority from a truly poor background, and they both attended good private schools thanks to parental tuition benefits. While the minorities were less affluent than whites, I couldn't find anyone from Strawberry Mansion.
Now, I know it makes sense to hide your background at these schools, but I'm good at spotting the little things. (Sadly, not House or Veronica Mars level, but "you speak in the passive voice a lot; are you from Kiev?" good.)
I completely agree that admissions committees are intellectually lazy. I think it might be in part because, unlike elite liberal arts graduate programs, the study of law doesn't require any particular set of skills or interests, or a specific type of preparation, and thus you get a huge number of people applying with very few weeding characteristics and little in common with one another. In combination with the size of most law school classes
I'm not sure this really matters. At Princeton, some departments get 1,000+ applications for eight or ten spots -- and the individual departments do the selection themselves (i.e., no admissions offices).
that helps me understand why law schools end up relying on silly things like index numbers and the pedigree of certain undergraduate institutions, and much less on writing samples and recommendations and interviews and such.
That said, I just don't believe that the use of race in admissions is a particularly egregious form of this laziness.
To be honest, I don't think it's more egregious either. My point is mostly just that the implementation based on laziness undermines the reason for its existence.
Yes, I think it would be really great if more lower-class URM students went to law school, and I think this would happen if there were greater attention to the challenges individual applicants face -- even without a specific program of socioeconomic AA. But I don't see URM admissions as a fixed quantity so that upper- and middle-class URM students have to be excused to make room for their poor and working class brothers and sisters. Do you? Can't we have more rich Latinos, middle-class African Americans, and poor Native Americans at the same time?
Ideally, yes. Realistically, no. The more I look at it, the more I'm convinced that it really is a zero-sum game.
Why? Because at the end of the day, law schools are watching USNWR -- and numbers are a huge determinant of where their schools will wind up. You don't get a bonus for having 20% of your class be black intsead of 10%, but unless you're one of the schools the USNWR is using to "prime" the rankings (i.e., HYS), you
will get penalized for having your LSAT median drop. (See Boalt.) If they can have their diversity numbers be respectable while getting students with higher scores to enroll, they will.
You know, I have a fairly rigid socialist training, and I was loath to admit it for a long time, but race really does matter. African American and Native American and Latino and Hmong (etc.) communities need lawyers to represent them, lawyers who reflect them and who understand the specific dynamics of their racial experiences. I work with many lawyers who represent a racial group that is different than their own, and I think that's great. But I've also noticed how, occasionally, these lawyers don't "get" things, how sometimes folks just want to talk to someone who understands better, who looks like them, who speaks a bit of Kreyol, whatever. I think that's fair.
I agree.
I also know that even upper-income African American and Latino families face huge disadvantages in life compared to their white counterparts: fewer assets, worse schools, diminshed expectations from teachers, worse healthcare, bad encounters with cops, etc., etc. I think it's right that AA should account for these qualities in addition to family income, and race itself is an imperfect but fairly reliable index.
I agree that upper-income URMs face problems with race that their white counterparts don't. In an ideal world, if the choice came down to them and a white person with an identical background and identical qualifications, the choice should go to the URM applicant.
The problem is that in the real world, it's not implemented that way.

p.s. This is the Lily I know and love! Astute, thoughtful, witty.
Thanks.
