The New York Times has, "Racial Diversity Efforts Ebb for Elite Careers, Analysis Finds." It focuses on African-Americans and women and reports that their inroads to the profession have stalled or even declined slightly. Not good news. My worry, which I've written about here before, is that the anticipated contraction in 1L enrollment could disproportionately hurt women and the lower part of the socio-economic spectrum. I don't know when we'll know how many students will show up this Fall. Recent news suggests that the precipitous decline in the number of applicants may be morphing into a slightly less precipitous decline. Of course, law schools could still enroll lots of students if the schools drop their admittance criteria. I don't know if and when we'll get good stats on the demographics of the enrollees. (And if the schools drop their criteria, it will be interesting to see if the bar admissions committees maintain their historic standards three years from now or ease up.)
Then there's this article from a Harvard Law student who argues that a lack of intellectual diversity in the law schools leaves the liberal students worse off, because they rarely encounter the sorts of arguments they'll have to face in the real world. Excerpt: "Many of these students graduate from law school without having encountered a cogent articulation of conservative views in the classroom, without having had their own ideas subjected to rigorous examination and debate." I can't say whether that's true across the country but I saw that happen at UC-Berkeley.
I used to ask a normative question on my take-home exams and instructed students to pick and defend a viewpoint about any of the issues we had encountered over the semester. I warned students that they needed to argue against the best articulation of the counter-argument to their postion. In my experience, the students who took a conservative position were far better able to articulate the opposing argument in charitable, sophisticated ways. Far better. The students who took left-leaning positions were generally very bad at that and sometimes comically so. When they'd meet to discuss their disappointing grade, I would read back to them their articulation of the best counter-argument and you could see on their faces the moment they realized they had attacked a straw man argument. Because of that, I finally stopped asking that type of question.
[edited since posting]