Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Lawyer demographics:
My colleague Rick Sander is one of the researchers on the [1]"After
the JD" project; they're interviewing a huge (about 3800) and fairly
representative sample of people who graduated from law school in 2000,
and they're just beginning to come up with data. (They intend to
interview them again on several occasions in the years to come.) Rick
gave a great presentation at UCLA yesterday about it, and much of the
data will be posted on the [2]NALP Foundation and [3]American Bar
Foundation sites.
Here's one tidbit, far from the most important one, but one that I
thought might be interesting, from p. 19 of the study:
2.5% of the [After the JD] respondents reported that they are gay
or lesbian. This figure is not very different from the 2.1% of the
general population, and 3.5% of the college educated population,
that self-identified as homosexual in the 1991 Laumann et al survey
. . . .
A footnote notes that "Given that younger people may be more likely to
report homosexuality, and that more people are openly gay now than a
decade ago, it is likely that the AJD sample reflects some
underreporting by the respondents. Those who reported being gay or
lesbian were distributed very much like the rest of the respondents by
gender, race, practice settings, and income, with a slight geographic
overrepresentation in New York and San Francisco."
The data can't be entirely precise, partly because of the limitations
of self-reporting, and partly because homosexuals are such a small
part of the population that random variations might throw off the
numbers considerably. (Also, I'm not sure how the study treated
bisexuals; I hope to get more data soon on that.) But it does seem
that homosexuals are roughly as represented in law as they are in the
population at large.
On the other hand, one can't make the same claim about Jews; Jews are
2% of the full-time working population, but 7% of the survey
respondents said they were Jewish (p. 20). Some stereotypes are indeed
accurate.
The survey also reported that 30% self-reported as Protestant, 27% as
Catholic, and 23% as having no religious identity, which suggests that
the irreligious are also overrepresented, though of course "no
religious identity" can be defined very differently in different
contexts, and it's thus hard to compare these numbers across surveys.
(Note also that some of the 23% might be secular Jews, so the Jewish
numbers might be higher than 7%.)
References
1. http://www.nalpfoundation.org/webmodules/articles/anmviewer.asp?a=51
2. http://www.nalpfoundation.org/
3. http://www.abf-socciolegal.org/
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