Abstract
Law school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, 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 diverse students 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 (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White 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.
