Diversity and Networking in Law School: Are Law Students from Diverse Backgrounds Disadvantaged?

法学院的多元化和网络：来自不同背景的法学院学生是否处于不利地位？

• 批准号: 2147011
• 负责人: Swethaa Ballakrishnen
• 金额: $ 51.12万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-03-01 至 2025-02-28
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2147011&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Diversity; Networking; Law; Students; Diverse

Interpersonal networks are an important, often invisible way through which hierarchies emerge and get reproduced. Particularly, in seemingly merit-based institutions, tracing these networks could reveal the unequal structures in which diverse populations experience systemic disparities. The American legal profession offers a useful site to track these processes of inequality because it remains unequal despite its increasing heterogeneity. Law students, like many professionals, are encouraged frequently to “network,” but students from a range of diverse backgrounds – including race, gender, sexual orientation, national status, and class – may have access to differentially resourced social networks, or social capital. These “network inequalities” may impact the value of legal education across differentially structured groups of students and ultimately shape differences in student experiences and career outcomes. Whereas research on the legal profession has highlighted the importance of social capital and relationships to promote careers, less attention has been paid to the nature of networks in early professional socialization. Particularly, while the research is rife with accounts about the racial, gendered, and nationality differences during law school and then, much later, during different career stages, not enough is known about the temporal experience of law school as it feeds into the transitional period between law school and the first years of professional careers. This period is important because it tracks the emergence of a path dependency that can serve diverse professionals differently and unequally even as it structurally seems equitable.Following an earlier longitudinal network and interview study of a cohort of first-year law students across three law schools, the research aims to examine the same law students’ social networks with a range of actors to evaluate the importance of social ties for the school-to-work transition in the legal profession. The project will investigate whether observed network inequalities can account for differential job market outcomes across diverse categories of students, as well as different outcomes at the end of students’ law school careers. This innovative, longitudinal dataset will provide insight into the role that network inequalities play in shaping not only variation in experiences across different groups of students, but ultimately the role that these structural inequalities play in producing differential pathways into the legal profession. Further, given the timing of the data, it will also provide a unique opportunity to observe student experiences disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the focus of this project is inequality in law schools and early legal careers, the relevance of our findings may extend beyond the legal profession, as well, to organizations struggling with similar dynamics, including non-law professional organizations and educational organizations, for example. Specifically, these findings may provide opportunities to create meaningful interventions that may mitigate existing inequalities and facilitate more equal outcomes within the legal profession and beyond.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

人际网络是一种重要的，往往是无形的方式，通过这种方式，等级制度出现并得到复制。特别是，在看似以成绩为基础的机构中，追踪这些网络可以揭示不平等的结构，在这种结构中，不同的人口经历着系统性的差异。美国法律的职业提供了一个有用的网站来跟踪这些不平等的过程，因为它仍然不平等，尽管它的异质性越来越大。法律专业的学生，像许多专业人士一样，经常被鼓励“网络”，但来自不同背景的学生-包括种族，性别，性取向，国家地位和阶级-可能有机会获得不同的社交网络，或社会资本。这些“网络不平等”可能会影响法律的教育在不同结构的学生群体中的价值，并最终形成学生经历和职业成果的差异。尽管对法律的职业的研究强调了社会资本和关系对促进职业发展的重要性，但对早期职业社会化中网络的性质关注较少。特别是，虽然研究充斥着关于种族，性别和国籍差异的帐户在法学院，然后，很久以后，在不同的职业生涯阶段，没有足够的法学院的时间经验，因为它进入法学院和职业生涯的第一年之间的过渡期。这一时期很重要，因为它追踪了一种路径依赖的出现，这种依赖可能以不同的方式、不平等地服务于不同的专业人士，尽管它在结构上似乎是公平的。该研究旨在研究同一法律学生的社交网络与一系列的行为者，以评估社会关系的重要性，为学校，法律的职业的工作转换。该项目将调查观察到的网络不平等是否可以解释不同类别学生的不同就业市场结果，以及学生法学院职业生涯结束时的不同结果。这个创新的纵向数据集将深入了解网络不平等不仅在塑造不同学生群体的经验变化方面发挥的作用，而且最终将深入了解这些结构性不平等在产生不同的法律的职业途径方面发挥的作用。此外，考虑到数据的时间，它还将提供一个独特的机会来观察受COVID-19大流行影响的学生体验。虽然这个项目的重点是法学院和早期法律的职业生涯中的不平等，但我们的研究结果的相关性可能会超出法律的职业，以及与类似动态斗争的组织，包括非法律专业组织和教育组织。具体而言，这些发现可能会提供机会，创造有意义的干预，可能会减轻现有的不平等和促进更平等的结果在法律的professional.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。