Does affirmative action help or hurt African American law students?

Two years ago, he published research suggesting that racial preferences at law firms might be responsible for black lawyers' high rate of attrition and difficulty making partner. He hypothesized that in the interest of promoting diversity, law firms sometimes hired black lawyers who were underqualified, and that when there was a "credentials gap" between black and white lawyers at a firm, black lawyers often were less likely to advance and more likely to leave the firm.

The research stirred debate throughout the legal community, and Sander said he was surprised at the vehemence with which people attacked his motives. A former Volunteers in Service to America participant, fair-housing activist and campaigner for Chicago's first black mayor, Sander, who is white, insisted he was simply trying to examine an important question.

Now the professor has waded into another controversy. Sander says his goal this time is to examine whether law schools set up many affirmative action beneficiaries for failure by admitting them into rigorous academic environments in which they are ill-prepared to compete. He proposes to study almost 30 years of data on State Bar of California exam-takers. In the end, he hopes to explain why, as reported in a Law School Admissions Council study in the 1990s, blacks are four times as likely as whites to fail the bar exam on the first try.

The state bar has refused to facilitate his probe. Citing privacy concerns, the bar has denied him access to detailed demographic data collected from exam-takers since 1972.

Many lawyers, scholars and diversity advocates have applauded the bar's action.

His conclusions in the earlier study and a paper he wrote for the North Carolina Law Review in June 2006 "essentially argued that law firms should not hire black graduates," said Deborah Waire Post, a Harvard Law School graduate, professor at New York's Touro Law Center and co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers.

"What this suggests is that Richard Sander is not studying affirmative action or diversity policies, he is marshaling evidence to show that blacks do not belong in elite schools or elite firms," Post said.