Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights bad news for a leading Triangle university.
At the end of finals period each May, the Duke Law Journal hosts a two-week-long competition to select its next crop of editors. Applicants write a 12-page memo, or casenote, analyzing an appellate court decision, as well as a 500-word essay about what they would “contribute” to the journal.
Students are chosen based on their grades, casenotes, and personal statements. Less than 20 percent of the class makes it onto the law review, which is overseen by Duke Law School and has no legal existence apart from it.
To help students prepare for the competition, the journal circulates a guide on how to write the casenote. Last year, however, it decided to give some students an additional document.
In a packet prepared for the law school’s affinity groups, the journal instructed minority students to highlight their race and gender as part of their personal statements—and revealed that they would earn extra points for doing so.
The packet, obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, included the rubric used to evaluate the personal statements. Applicants can earn up to 10 points for explaining how their “membership in an underrepresented group” will “lend itself to … promoting diverse voices,” and an additional 3-5 points if they “hold a leadership position in an affinity group.”
To drive home the point, the packet included four examples of personal statements that had gotten students on the law review. Three of those statements referenced race in the first sentence, with one student boasting that, “[a]s an Asian-American woman and a daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges.” …
… The packet was only distributed to the affinity groups, according to a person familiar with the matter, which meant that minority students had access to inside information about the scoring process.
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Author: Mitch Kokai
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