PORTRAIT PROJECT 2.0 Spring 2020 Donor Update

At the American Bar Foundation (ABF), we are dedicated to expanding knowledge and advancing justice through rigorous empirical and interdisciplinary research on the law, legal institutions, and legal processes. Portrait Project 2.0 is one of many ABF projects focusing on diversity and inclusion in the legal profession. The study’s goal is to promote a more just society by helping us understand and break down barriers to greater diversity and inclusion that are found in practice and before the law.

Thanks to your vision and generosity, work on Portrait Project 2.0 is underway. This report provides a background on the project, highlights accomplishments over the past several months, and offers a plan for the future.

Background: Project Overview

Building on findings from the ABF’s After the JD (AJD) study, the initial National Asian Pacific Bar Association (NAPABA) and Yale Law School study Portrait Project examined the role of Asian Americans in the legal profession. The original Portrait Project research documented the historically dramatic growth of Asian American lawyers over the past three decades, the recent and sharp decline in law school enrollment, and the limited number of Asian Americans in the profession’s highest leadership positions – from judicial clerks, to law firm partners, to top prosecutors and judges, to law school deans and non-profit executives. Together, the two studies have begun to document and situate Asian Americans in the legal profession. Still, further research needs to be done.

The central goal of Portrait Project 2.0 is to begin the process of creating a more detailed descriptive dataset of Asian Americans in the legal profession. Before we can provide answers to the challenges of developing a more diverse legal profession, we must identify and analyze the factors that have facilitated and frustrated the goals of diversity and inclusion. Although there is growing interest in diversity in the legal profession, we currently lack a fundamental, baseline understanding of the more detailed demographics of the profession, particularly with regards to Asian Americans. Thus, the first phase of this broader research project seeks to provide a comprehensive empirical account of two areas: (1) diversity in law school enrollment trends and (2) diversity within federal judicial clerkships.

Recent Highlights

With the help of our generous supporters, the ABF has already made tremendous strides in this research project. Shih-Chun Chien, a research social scientist, was hired in July 2019 to support the project. Chien is a recent graduate from Stanford University, where he received his JSD and JSM degrees. He obtained his LL.M. degree from University of California, Berkeley School of Law and his LL.B. and LL.M. from National Chengchi University in Taiwan. His primary research interests are criminal justice, the legal profession, organizational analysis, and prosecutorial ethics. In fall 2019, the ABF Board of Directors officially approved Portrait Project 2.0 as an ABF project, after a rigorous four-tier research review process.

Portrait Project 2.0’s recently completed study, Who’s Going to Law School: Recent Trends in Law School Enrollment, written by Justice Goodwin Liu, Miranda Li, and Phillip Yao, relies on comprehensive data from the most recent decade to document how the demographic composition of law students has changed since the Great Recession. More specifically, the article examines enrollment data by gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality, with particular attention to Asian Americans. This study will be published soon in the University of California-Davis Law Review. A condensed version of this article will be published and circulated soon as a policy brief by the ABF.

Project researchers have also initiated a pilot survey for a national study of diversity in judicial clerkships. The main goal of this portion of the larger project is to understand the roles that law school administrators and faculty play in the student clerkship application process. Results from this study will facilitate our understanding of the institutional support mechanisms that exist for law students, including how law schools track, advise, and mentor students interested in judicial clerkships. The team also aims to learn more about how law schools encourage and facilitate mentoring and the impact of such mentoring on women and diverse students interested in clerkships. As part of the project, researchers have enlisted 14 of the top law schools in a more intensive study that anonymizes both student and school-level data. By working with institutional partners, such as the National Association of Law Placement (NALP) and the Federal Judicial Center, as well as individual law faculty and deans, the research team is optimistic that they will be able to gather critical data about the tracking, advising, and mentoring of law students interested in judicial clerkships.

Project Media:

Recent Project Presentations: Justice Goodwin Liu February 3: Center for Law & Society workshop, University of California, Berkeley School of Law. February 3: Law clerks and attorney staff of California Supreme Court. February 11: Professor David B. Wilkins’ Harvard Law School class on the legal profession.

Ajay K. Mehrotra January 2-5: 2020 Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting. February 29: Symposium on Diversity and Inclusion in the Legal Profession, William & Mary Law School.

Plans for the Future

In future phases of this project, the research team aims to identify and analyze the factors that might explain some of the forces and components behind the limits of diversity in the legal profession. Because law school enrollment and judicial clerkships are two key components in the diversity pipeline for the profession, the study – focusing mainly but not exclusively on Asian Americans – will shed further light on the promises and challenges of building a more diverse legal profession.

The research team has been collaborating with several research projects and institutions to collect, identify, and analyze promising avenues of data. For example, co-PI Justice Goodwin Liu is working with Judge Jeremy Fogel (currently Executive Director of the UC-Berkeley Judicial Institute and formerly Director of the Federal Judicial Center) to collect data from judges. The AJD and the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) research teams have shared their databases with the Portrait Project 2.0 research team, and the team has begun reviewing the databases and extracting relevant information. The next phase of Portrait Project 2.0 will incorporate these existing data sources. For example, the research team is working on an article as part of the judicial clerkship project that showcases how LSSSE data can provide insight into understanding law students’ career perceptions and preferences.

The research team has been in touch with the directors of judicial clerkships programs at Northwestern University Pritzker Law School and Cornell Law School. The team has received valuable information regarding the basic information of applications and resources available to students. The team will further target other top law schools, for the specific focus on federal appeals court clerkships. Surveying the group of law school clerkship advisors and administrative staffs will provide further insight into the data collection scheme. The research team has recently proposed a program for the 2020 NAPABA Convention to present the first phase of this research project.

None of our research achievements would have been possible without the generous support of our many donors (listed below). We look forward to acknowledging these groups’ steadfast support for Portrait Project 2.0 and the ABF, as we continue to provide regular donor updates and share the findings from our long-term project.

The ABF is deeply grateful for the generous support from:

The ABF is deeply grateful for generous multi-year sponsorship support from the entities listed below:

PLATINUM SPONSOR

GOLD SPONSOR

SILVER SPONSORS

Anonymous

Special thanks for additional support from:

Sylvia Chin

Asian American Law Fund of New York