Richard Sander: A Life Dedicated to Law, Economics, and Social Justice
Richard Henry Sander, born on May 26, 1956, is an American legal scholar and economist whose career has been dedicated to exploring complex issues of law, economics, and social justice. As the Jesse Dukeminier Professor in Law at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, he is known for his research on affirmative action and housing segregation. Sander's work often challenges conventional wisdom and sparks debate, making him a prominent voice in legal and policy circles.
Early Life and Education
Sander’s commitment to social and economic equality has been a constant throughout his life. He was born in Washington, D.C., and spent his childhood in small towns in northwest Indiana. In 1978, Sander graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in social studies. Following his undergraduate degree, Sander became involved with the federal Vista program working with a housing group on the south side of Chicago. While organizing tenant unions and building receiverships, he was deeply impressed with the work of the South Shore Bank, an experimental, community-development bank owned by churches and foundations. Sander secured funding from three federal agencies and, with the Woodstock Institute, completed the first detailed study of the bank. South Shore Bank was widely imitated as an instrument for community revitalization in other urban areas over the next two decades.
He then pursued graduate studies at Northwestern University, where he studied law and economics, earning a Master of Arts in economics in 1985, a Juris Doctor degree from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 1988, and a Ph.D. in 1990. During his graduate studies at Northwestern, Sander served on the board of the Rogers Park Tenants Committee and was involved in the election effort and subsequent transition team of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor.
Academic Career at UCLA
Sander joined the UCLA School of Law faculty in 1989 and became a full professor there five years later. During the 1990s, Sander was involved in several Los Angeles civic initiatives. He served as President of the Fair Housing Congress of Southern California from 1984 to 1996; founded the Fair Housing Institute in 1996, and helped the City of Los Angeles design and implement in 1997 what was, at the time, the nation's most ambitious living wage law. Sander also persuaded regional authorities to develop outreach programs that sharply increased local usage of the Earned Income Tax Credit, generating tens of millions of dollars annually for LA's poorest working families. Sander was one of seven UCLA faculty members and staff who launched the Program in Public Interest Law and Policy, which created a distinct curriculum aimed at public interest students. From 1998 to 2004, Sander helped to steer the "After the JD" study, the first national panel study of law school graduates. In 1998-99, Sander and others at the School of Law launched the Empirical Research Group (ERG), an entity designed to help faculty members undertake ambitious empirical projects and introduce more quantitative and methodological sophistication into their policy-related work.
Sander teaches courses in Property, Quantitative Methods, Urban Housing, and Policy Analysis.
Read also: An in-depth look at Richard Blumenthal
Research on Affirmative Action and the "Mismatch Effect"
Sander is best known for his research on affirmative action, which claims that it actually causes more negatives than benefits for African American law students by hurting them due to the overly competitive environments in more prestigious schools, through what he calls the "mismatch effect". He published his research in a 2004 article in Stanford Law Review where he claimed that if minority students had been admitted into less-competitive schools for which they would qualify without affirmative action, they would have been more successful. He has also published studies suggesting that law firms' efforts to promote diversity sometimes led to them hiring underqualified black lawyers, leading to these lawyers being more likely than their better-credentialed white counterparts to leave the firm.
His work posits that affirmative action policies, while intended to promote diversity, may inadvertently place some students in academic environments where they struggle to compete, leading to lower grades, bar passage rates, and ultimately, fewer black lawyers. This "mismatch effect" suggests that students admitted under affirmative action might have been more successful at less competitive institutions.
Sander's research has been met with both support and criticism. Some scholars have confirmed aspects of his mismatch findings, while others dispute his conclusions about the overall impact of affirmative action on the number of black lawyers.
Criticisms and Rebuttals
Sander's research is controversial and has been widely criticized, including by Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks. Ayres and Brooks published a study in 2005 finding that eliminating affirmative action would not increase the number of black lawyers by 7.9 percent, as Sander's study had claimed, but that it would instead reduce the number of lawyers by about 12.7 percent. A 2008 study by Jesse Rothstein and Albert H. Yoon confirmed Sander's mismatch findings, but also found that eliminating affirmative action would "lead to a 63 percent decline in black matriculants at all law schools and a 90 percent decline at elite law schools." These high numbers predictions were doubted in the National Bureau of Economic Research article by Peter Arcidiacono and Michael Lovenheim; a lower, 32.5 percent was another decrease cited and considered in the article. Their 2016 article found a strong indication that racial preference results in a mismatch effect.
Critics argue that Sander's analysis oversimplifies the complex factors that contribute to student success and that eliminating affirmative action would drastically reduce the representation of minority students in higher education. They also point to alternative explanations for disparities in academic outcomes, such as stereotype threat and socioeconomic factors.
Read also: Honoring Lt. Collins: The Memorial Scholarship
Data Access and Legal Battles
In 2006, and in order to gain further research information regarding his mis match theory, excepting individuals privacy information, Sander requested the California Bar to release its stored data of bar exam scores, grade point averages and LSAT scores including race and gender information of everyone who applied to the bar association. The bar denied this request based on privacy grounds. In 2008, and along with the First Amendment Coalition, Sander filed a lawsuit in California Supreme Court demanding the release of that information. On April 12, 2016, the court ruled that the California Bar was required to oblige with Sander's request.
Sander's pursuit of data underscores his commitment to empirical research and his belief that access to comprehensive data is essential for understanding complex social issues.
Other Work and Perspectives
Sander has also co-written a book, along with Stuart Taylor, Jr., entitled Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It. In 2015, Sander filed a Brief Amicus Curiae In Support of Neither Party in regards to the affirmative action issue addressed by Supreme Court of the United States in Fisher v. In 2022, he wrote an article in Politico on the topic of the ongoing case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Sander also coauthored Moving Toward Integration (coauthored with Yana Kucheva and Jonathan Zasloff and published by Harvard University Press) which attempts to explain the complex evolution of housing segregation, and argues that housing desegregation is not only attainable, but an efficient and effective way of addressing racial inequality more broadly. Sander helped create a non-profit to work with cities directly on desegregation strategies.
Sander has been working on questions of social and economic inequality for nearly all of his career. After California voters approved Propostion 209 in 1996 - banning the use of race in various government programs, including admissions at the University of California - Sander successfully argued for the adoption of class-based preferences in the law school’s admissions, and published a study on the results of this experiment in 1997.
Personal Life
Sander is married to astrophysicist Fiona Harrison and has a son, Robert. He lives in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Read also: The Career of Richard Hendrix
tags: #richard #sander #ucla #biography
