Students\' Eyes, Look-Alike Lawyers Don\'t

¶ … Students' Eyes, Look-Alike Lawyers Don't Make the Grade" presents the effort of Stanford law students to encourage diversity in law firms in the U.S. with a project in which they give grades to the different law firms based on their inclusion practices on different minority categories, such as Hispanics, women, African-American employees or gay employees.

The project is aimed at encouraging law firms to diversify their workforce and be more inclusive. The way this is done, however, is highly questionable and one can wonder as to the efficiency of such measures. The implementation of measures to encourage diversity in different law firms is done by applying pressure. As such, students in the project are asking law firms to restrict recruiting at companies at law firms with a low score and they are pressuring the Fortune 500 companies against hiring counsel from law firms that scored low on their project.

There are several legal issues that are worth considering here. The project itself is a useful way by which students can analyze diversity in law firms and shed more light on how jobs are distributed among different minorities. However, there attempts to deter hiring from companies with a bad diversity score almost looks like disloyal competition and one can only wonder whether or not this could be a campaign that is coordinated by other law firms. The idea of disloyal competition is tacitly recognized by one of the students in the project, who explains that this is a way in which they are trying to put pressure on the market.

At the same time, the logical considerations behind this project are also absurd. It is obviously an excellent idea to encourage diversity, but to make out of the diversity issue a reason to hire somebody could be insulting to the minorities as well. How would some of Hispanic origins feel knowing that he was selected over a better prepared white male just because he was a Hispanic? Why would the professional considerations stop playing the most important part in determining whether an individual will get a certain job or not?

From a legal perspective, it almost seems as if this project will encourage a different kind of discrimination: the discrimination against white males, no matter how well prepared they are, just because the law firms will need to increase their rates of acceptance and minority inclusion. This type of discrimination could become a serious legal issue if one of these white males could prove he was not selected exactly because he was part of the majority.