Why Affirmative Action Does Not Cause Black Students To Fail the Bar

In a widely discussed empirical study, Richard Sander concludes that affirmative action at U.S. law schools causes black students to fail the bar. If correct, this conclusion would turn the jurisprudence, policy, and law of affirmative action on its head. Yet the article misapplies basic principles of causal inference, which enjoy virtually universal acceptance in the scientific community. As a result, the study draws internally inconsistent and empirically invalid conclusions about the effects of affirmative action. Correcting the assumptions and testing the hypothesis directly shows that