The Role of Race in Law Faculty Hiring

Ming Zhu has a new paper out on SSRN - An Empirical Study of Race and Law School Hiring - that will be of interest to those who think about race in academia.  Zhu studied the 2004-05 hiring year and concluded that, holding factors like law school grades and law review membership constant, race had a positive effect on the odds of a candidate getting a law school job.  But, and it's a big but, she concludes that being a minority had a negative effect on the odds of a candidate getting a job at a high status school.  She notes:

As an anecdote, every single hire made by the top 16 schools from the FAR of 2004-2005 was of a white candidate; not a single minority candidate was hired by any of the top 16 law schools.

I haven't had a chance to read this piece through, but I suspect that it will raise a ton of issues - substantively and methodologically. 

-- Dan Filler (cross-posted at The Faculty Lounge)