The Legal System and the Law of Unintended Concequences

Quotas have been targeted for a while, and probably unfairly. After all, what other system is there which can be implemented across the board without way more effort than should probably be expended on admissions?

Consider a population with 90% of one type of person and 10% of another. How many of the ten-percenters should a Law School admit if it has 100 spaces in its First-year class? Is it the answer that it should admit students based upon merit and not upon the percent of being one type of person (or another)?

What if no ten-percenters are admitted in 2003? Fair enough, it's a small percentage of the population so every now and then the figure might be zero. What happens if there are no ten-percenters in 2004? 2005? Etc. - what if 2023 rolls around and no ten-percenters are admitted to the school? Is it just a byproduct of scholastic selectivity, or is it discrimination?

Consider a school that admits 10 of the ten-percenters every year, without fail, because of a quota. Some of these ten-percenters are good students and should be admitted anyway. Some are decent students and, while perhaps they shouldn't have been admitted, rise to the occasion and get by all right and possibly even excel (don't laugh, I went to Law School with several people who were provisionally admitted, and one of them ended up graduating with the highest GPA ever in the history of the school). Some do terribly and never should have been there. Let's even say that an average of 8 of the ten-percenters get through the Law School every year. Then the ninety-percenters begin to complain, because 10 of them, every year, were not admitted in order to fulfill the quota. Or is the argument more tenable if the ninety-percenters only complain about the 2 who flunked?

And when does the ninety-percenters' argument become viable? Is it when the ten-percenters are admitted, or is it when they flunk out? If it's when they flunk out, this seems to me to be a very difficult system to follow - wouldn't schools worry about their admissions decisions throughout a student's entire Law School career? Wouldn't the Admissions Department be continuously worried that the other shoe was going to drop?

I'm rambling here; I'm not sure I know the solution, but I think you may be right. With quotas, at least 10 of the ten-percenters get into Law School, and 8 of them do well enough to graduate (don't forget, the 90 ninety-percenters in the class might not all graduate, either). Without quotas, years could go by with none of the ten-percenters going to Law School. Isn't this the creation of an underclass, the prospect of which drove decisions like Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS (US Sup. Ct. 1954)?

fishin' It's still against the law to discriminate on the base of race, color, religion, culture, sexual orientation, age, gender, and some others in employment. On the same token, I doubt that businesses are going to all of a sudden turn around and go back to discriminatory practices. c.i.

Yes, of course it is still against the law to discriminate. At the same time it seems to me that it will be harder to demonstrate that someone IS violating the law should it happen.

I don't think business will go back to wholesale discriminatory practices either but I'm not naive enough to believe that NONE of them will. You don't think any will try it?

I think you highlight something important. The difficulty to quantify discrimination based on race. Each applicant turned down is discriminated against but how do you tell what the determining factor was?

fishn' Some stupid managers still try it to see if they can get away with it, and end up paying millions in settlements. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure "it doesn't pay," but there's no law against stupid. c.i.