Supreme Court ruling supports UNLV standards

Jennifer Knight

Wednesday, June 25, 2003 | 9:41 a.m.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed race to be a factor in admissions reaffirmed a policy the UNLV law school has been using since it opened in 1998, officials said Tuesday.

"I think every law school in the country was watching (the case)," said Frank Durand, dean of admissions at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Boyd School of Law. "But I think this is something, again, that reinforced what we've been doing here all along."

The law school uses race as a factor in its admissions practice, along with other considerations such as academic record, community service, age and life experience, Durand said.

The admission policy at UNLV's law school is similar to that at the University of Michigan Law School. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Michigan's consideration of an individual's race during the admissions process is acceptable as long as there is a "compelling government interest."

The court also ruled in a second decision that a point system used in Michigan's undergraduate admissions was not acceptable because it treated whole groups of applicants differently.

The court's decision could have easily gone the other direction and caused UNLV and law schools across the country to change their practices.

"Virtually every law school across the country would have had to make some changes had that been the result," said Joan Howarth, a professor of constitutional law at UNLV.

The Supreme Court had to weigh two prevailing opinions, Howarth said.

The first was a 1996 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, Hopwood v. Texas, which said that admissions should be blind to race.

The second was a 1978 ruling in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, which made racial quotas illegal but said some consideration of race was acceptable.

While only a handful of states had to adhere to the Hopwood ruling, the rest of the nation, including Nevada, was guided by the Bakke case.

"The faculty of the law school used the Bakke case as a blueprint for admissions," Howarth said.

Howarth said many who watched the Michigan case were concerned the Supreme Court would be more conservative in its ruling.

"There was a suspicion by many people that the court would move away from the analysis of the Bakke decision," Howarth said.

Had that happened, UNLV would have likely taken race out of the equation for admissions and decided whether other factors, such as age, sex and life experience would stay.

The practice of affirmative action currently attempts to reflect the same diversity in the academic population as exists in the general population.

But that standard isn't applied strictly when admitting undergraduates at UNLV because it is a general admissions institution, officials said.

UNLV's law school, however, is more selective, allowing only 140 seats for 1,700 applicants this semester. Screening for diversity helps the school have a variety of students while still having a pool of qualified candidates.

As a result of those diversity efforts, 22 percent of last year's entering students were minorities.

"We want a racially diverse class," Howarth said. "We want men and women in our classes. We want people of different religions, of different ages. And all of those diversity goals were reaffirmed by the Supreme Court this week."