What COVID-19 Institutional Responses Teaches Us About the Value of a Law Degree for Latinx Law Students

• In Event: A Seat at the Table? Cultivating Legal Education for Marginalized and Minoritized Law Students Within and Beyond Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Latinx-serving law schools are embedded within the broader hierarchical, prestige- and ranking- driven legal system (Espeland, et. al. 2016; Jewel, 2015; Muñiz et al., 2020). Thus, while they educate the larger proportion of future Latinx lawyers, the environment shapes the institutional actors’ and students’ experiences. We extend the work on Hispanic-Serving Institutions (García, 2020; Castro Samayoa, 2018) and graduate schools to Latinx law students’ education to better understand how to best serve them as the Latinx population continues to grow in the U.S. and the need for Latinx lawyers increases.

Using an integrated conceptual framework that integrated the theory of racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) and the concept of racial capitalism (Leong, 2012), we analyzed Latinx law students’ accounts of their institutions early COVID-19 responses to examine what these accounts reveal about the racialized valuation of the legal degree. The students attended Latinx-serving law schools across different tiers in the law schools ranking system. We analyzed the data as a team, composed of two leading researchers and two research assistants, using theory-driven codes as well as data-driven inductive codes (Ravitch & Carl, 2016).

Preliminary findings show how students’ value adjudication of their legal education remained unchanged with COVID-19. Rather, the seismic changes of the pandemic further entrenched perceptions of racialized difference across students’ institutional rankings. We enumerate our thematic findings below:

(1) Early institutional responses substantially changed the mode of instruction for students, often exacerbating pre existing inequalities in students’ experiences. However, students’ accounts evidenced an unchanged appraisal of their legal degree given their sense that their institution retained their value in a competitive legal market. For students in higher ranked law schools, their degrees carried greater capital in the legal profession, affording them more professional opportunities. For students at so-called “lower-ranked” law schools, the rankings were less important, but their focus was on obtaining the credential that would allow them to serve their underrepresented communities where hierarchies carried lower valuational prestige than the credential itself.

(2) Racial Taxation. We note institutions offered support but the context was fraught with the disproportionate racial tax students and faculty of color carried prior to the pandemic. The Latinx community offered support, and at the same time, given the competition-driven environment, some students remained cognizant of the importance of excelling in the new environment to maintain a competitive advantage. Their resilience in shouldering the discombobulation COVID-19 brought, given students’ prior adverse experiences, was evident. During the symposium, we will invite the audience to engage with the potential implications of this work.

Emergent findings from this study suggest that the institutional shifts wrought by COVID-19 underscore the permanence of racialized taxation within legal education wherein minoritized students must employ tools to navigate their legal education, including amidst a global crisis. Our work extends the broader body of literature in which critical scholars have called to transform legal education to respond to the needs of minoritized students who experience trauma in the education system (e.g., Brown & Brown, 2010; Nicolazzo et. al., 2021).

Authors

• Raquel Muñiz, Boston College

• Andrés Castro Samayoa, Boston College