I'll play along this one time:
In the name of friendly discussion, I'll skip the quote war and answer your questions in earnest.
1. Do you dispute that minorities are frequently admitted to schools with lower objective criteria? (Isn't this the whole point of AA / preferential admissions?)
No.
Okay, so we agree that minorities are frequently admitted to schools with lower objective criteria.
One can debate how much AA affects whites. I will note that it actually appears to affect asians far more, at least at the undergrad level. However, one could also argue that segregation itself affected a fairly small percentage of the country.
Even if it only affected a few people, however, (which appears unlikely), the mere existence of official, state-sponsored racial discrimination is itself provocative and poisonous to race relations.
Again, as is your custom, this is completely speculative. Judging from the way you frame your statement and articulate your views, it seems that the "state-sponsored racial discrimination" is merely a rationalization for your own (not so) latent racism.
I don't understand why your objections here about the importance of these credentials would not also apply to students who receive extra consideration based on socioeconomic factors, but I agree with you that socioeconomic factors should be taken into account in law school admissions.)
Well, those people who have slightly lower numbers from tougher backgrounds are presumably (or at least potentially) as capable as their more affluent counterparts, as their true ability is somewhat obscured by their educational handicaps. The same analysis would not apply to a more privileged minority.
To the extent schools are already looking at SES, that's certainly a step in the right direction. However, it does not, in itself, explain why non-disadvantaged minorities need or deserve special consideration. The burden therefore remains on proponents to justify such action.
I think one compelling answer would be that schools seek to construct a class with a measure of diversity, and because of the fewer numbers of minority applicants they have to look deeper into the applicant pool.
Of course this is but one answer among many. And methinks you have a strange definition of "capability."
but it appears from more supple research on the subject that there are actually different groups of students at the bottom of the class: (1) white and ORM students with lower entry credentials and (2) URM students with lower entry credentials. I split these groups up because the LSAT tends to vastly overpredict URM performance in law school and it therefore doesn't make a lot of sense to correlate URM overrepresentation at the bottom of the class with entry credentials. Indeed, URMs at schools where their entry credentials match the white medians (where you might expect them to attend without affirmative action) also tend to cluster at the bottom of the class. See, e.g., Ayres & Brooks 2005, which limits the analysis, as Sander does, to black students.
I believe the cited study acknowledges that urms (and others) with lower credentials tend to cluster at the bottom of their class. It also claims that they tend to struggle somewhat even when they don't have lower credentials. However, I don't believe even they claim the effect is quite the same. Whatever struggles minority students face in school, credential mismatch is clearly part of the problem, and ignoring this won't make it go away.
Part but not all of the problem. In fact I think we've done a decent job of explaining this already. Miss P. has repeatedly pointed out that programs like Hastings' LEOP prove to be extremely beneficial in helping disadvantaged students with law school. I've also provided you with a study of minority relations at a law student that pretends to have one of the most minority-friendly environments of all law schools - did you even bother to read that?
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