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48 St. Louis U. L.J. 955 (2003-2004)
Merit and Diversity: The Origins of the Law School Admissions Test

handle is hein.journals/stlulj48 and id is 967 raw text is: MERIT AND DIVERSITY: THE ORIGINS OF THE LAW SCHOOL ADMISSIONS TEST WILLIAM P. LAPIANA* I. INTRODUCTION This Article discusses the creation of the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and is based on surviving archival materials.1 This story is particularly important today, fifty-five years after the first administration of the LSAT, because the use of an individual's LSAT score in law school admission is in some ways at the heart of the controversy regarding affirmative action in law school admissions, a role upon which the United States Supreme Court has recently ruled. In Grutter v. Bollinger, a divided Court found that the University of Michigan's admission policies, which were carefully tailored to take race into account as an element of diversity, did not violate the Equal Protection Clause.2 In short, the so-called objective measures-grade point average and the LSAT score-need not be the only criteria by which applicants are judged. In the Court's view, the LSAT plays an important, though limited, role. It remains a useful law school admissions tool. One thesis of this Article is that the LSAT was created to be a tool and that it was not intended to be the sole criterion for making admission decisions, an assertion strongly supported by the historical record. A second thesis is inferred from the record by placing it in context. Given the circumstances facing American law schools after the second World War, the creation of an objective test as an aspect of law school admissions increased access to legal education. Finally, this Article argues that it is reasonable to conclude that this expansion of access was the aim of at least some of the legal academics involved in the creation of the test. * Rita and Joseph Solomon Professor of Wills, Trusts and Estates, New York Law School. 1. These materials form the records of both the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) and of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The author was given access to them by the LSAC, which has in its possession the relevant ETS records on microfiche. The interpretations and conclusions in this Article are those of the author alone and are not in any sense the official view of the LSAC or of ETS. 2. Grutter v. Bollinger, 123 S. Ct. 2325, 2347 (2003).

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