Epps and Green on Black Lawyers Matter: An Oral History of Race-Inclusive Admissions at Yale @TempleLaw @TempleEpps

JoAnne Epps and Craig Green, both of Temple University School of Law, have published Black Lawyers Matter: An Oral History of Race-Inclusive Admissions at Yale as Temple University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2023-21. Here is the abstract.

Almost no one knows that Yale had the first affirmative action policy of any elite law school in the country. Twelve Black students who were admitted in 1968 formed the largest nonwhite group to attend Yale Law School in 150 years. At the time, race-inclusive admissions were immediately condemned as an “explosive sociological experiment” in apartheid segregation that would damage Yale’s reputation while producing a sense of “intellectual superiority among the white students” and “intellectual inferiority among the Black students.” Critics endorsed a general aspiration for law schools to educate students from racial minority groups, but not at elite institutions like Yale: “There are many good regional and local law schools in Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and other metropolitan areas, where Black law students . . . can study law in competition with students of similar qualifications and aptitudes.” Despite those critiques and predictions, all of the twelve Black Yale students eventually became judges, professors, civil rights lawyers, government leaders, in-house counsel, or successful private attorneys. For more than fifty years—an “Affirmative Action Era”—elite law schools across the United States have admitted Black students who transformed the history of legal education, the legal profession, and society at large. To understand and document that phenomenon, we sought to contact every Black Yale law student from the entering classes of 1963 to 1978. Using oral history techniques, we interviewed forty-seven people in thirteen states, including one person from each class year. Such interviews offer unparalleled detail about Black students who attended Yale in this period, what law school was like at the time, professional opportunities that emerged afterward, and structural obstacles that individuals had to confront, overcome, or dismantle in law school and throughout their professional lives. This Article uses new historical materials and interpretations to challenge modern stereotypes and generalizations about affirmative action that have been endorsed by prominent critics including Justice Clarence Thomas. Specific historical narratives from former Yale students illustrate dramatic risks of colorblind constitutionalism across the country, and this Article’s multilayered history of affirmative action supports solutions that recognize the profound importance of Black law students in the past, present, and future. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link.