National Association of Scholars has revamped its web site.
Terry Pell analyzes why Federal District Judge David Lawson rejected the legal arguments against Michigan’s amendment barring racial preferences.
Pre-trial discovery was turning up evidence that the extensive use of racial preferences at Michigan universities was directly causing racial disparities in grades, majors, graduation and professional examination results. Far from helping the case for racial preferences, pre-trial discovery was undermining it.
. . . (UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander) . . . had submitted his preliminary findings to the court, including the revelation that minority students at the UM Law School failed the bar at more than eight times the rate of white students during the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.
During the trial in Grutter v. Bollinger on race-based admissions at the UM law school, UM Professor Richard Lempert testified that racial differences in bar failure rates were “trivial.”
Full article makes a much stronger indictment of the judge and UM. In particular, the implications are that 1) the UM prevaricated on the performance of minority students in the law school, and 2) the whole reason for dismissal of the case has to do with preserving the Grutter decision which allowed the UM law school, and other schools to continue to use race as an item in admission decisions, as long as this is a ‘holistic’ process.
1) The university quite possibly fudged its data analysis on the performance of minority students at UM law and/or the professor describing it fudged the interpretation.
In the Grutter trial, ‘When called as an expert witness in that case, then UM Professor Richard Lempert testified that, 

“not to put too fine a point on it, Michigan graduates pass the bar. It doesn’t matter really whether you’re a minority or whether you’re white… I think there might of have been a statistically significant difference favoring whites, but it was substantively sort of completely trivial. It was like 95 percent of minorities and 98 or something or 99 percent of whites.â€â€¨â€¨
‘Lempert based this conclusion on an exhaustive study he authored with David Chambers and Terry Adams of the careers of minority law school graduates during the 26-year period between 1970 and 1996.’
A problem arose in the current case because a law school prof at UCLA, Richard Sander, carefully examined recent data from the UM law school and ‘submitted his preliminary findings to the court, including the revelation that minority students at the UM Law School failed the bar at more than eight times the rate of white students during the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.’
With this result in hand, ‘[I]n Sander’s view, it was implausible that minority bar failure rates could have been stable for 26 years up until 2001 when Lempert testified, and then suddenly balloon to eight times the white failure rate in 2004, 2005 and 2006.’
The additional data from previous years could have substantially undermined the Grutter decision.
Based on Sander’s suspicions about the analysis of previous data, those defending the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative were asking to be given the law school data used to support Prof. Lempert’s testimony.
‘The evidence Sander was beginning to develop seemed to undermine the well-financed effort by the UM to reassure the Supreme Court that the racial preferences employed by the UM law school were a comparatively modest effort that produced benefits for the law school and for minority law students. Sander’s analysis suggested just the opposite: the preferences were extreme and directly harmed the academic prospects of minority students. If Sander’s analysis held for other years, it would have undermined both the UM’s expert testimony and the Supreme Court rulings based on that testimony.’
2) There would also have been implications for places outside of Michigan, as in parallel with the Grutter case, a second case, Gratz, dealt with UM undergrad admissions. In this case the mechanical basis of taking race into account was found inadmissible, but the holistic methods used at the law school were allowed. Sander’s data also contained information about both the law school and the undergraduate admissions.
‘Sander was able to confirm his earlier finding that the undergraduate system may have produced fewer harms than the law school system. For one thing, the newly-produced data showed that a substantial number of minorities with strong credentials attend the UM undergraduate college. These students could have been admitted without any consideration of race and presumably resisted offers from more competitive schools to attend the UM. It was thus possible for Sander to compare, for the first time, the academic records of UM undergraduate minorities who did not receive a racial preference with those who undoubtedly did.


‘According to Sander, there were dramatic differences between the two groups. Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% — higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%. If Sander is right, it raises a real question whether this latter group benefited from the UM’s heavy use of race or whether they would not have had better academic outcomes at less prestigious schools.’
An implication of the judge’s rapid switch from a seemingly favorable attitude toward the opponents of MCRI, to a dismissal of their case may well have more to do with keeping the data hidden from the public and out of official court records.