Diverse Disconnectedness: Homophily, Social Capital Inequality and Student Experiences in Law School

Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center 

Law school students are encouraged frequently to "network." However, depending on race, gender, national status, and class, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to students at the periphery across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N= 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students' social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (i.e., race and sexual identity) and contexts (i.e., type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homogenous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students' experience and success.