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AmLaw: Did Affirmative Action at Yale Really Hurt Clarence Thomas?

By Dan Slater

Clarence Thomas in a 1959 high school photo. Credit: Associated Press.

Clarence Thomas has insisted that affirmative action tainted the value of his Yale law degree, and destroyed his chances for a big firm job out of school.

In his memoir, published last fall, he wrote: “I’d learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much anyone denied it. I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value.”

Had it? In the June issue of American Lawyer magazine, Tamara Loomis, in a piece entitled “The 15-Cent Diploma,” tests Justice Thomas’s premise. In interviews with a dozen African Americans who graduated from Yale law school in the early 70’s (Thomas graduated in ‘74), Lewis found that, while three remembered encountering various forms of racism in the job market, all of them — including Rufus Cormier, the first black partner at Houston’s Baker & Botts, and Daniel Johnson, the first black partner at Cooley Godward — believe that affirmative action programs, like Yale’s, which was instituted in 1969, are part of the solution, not the problem.

“How is it Yale’s fault that society is not accepting of black people?” asks Johnson (’73), whose first job out of Yale was assistant AG of California. As for Thomas’s assertion that Yale’s affirmative action program, which aimed for an average of 10% minority students, made his degree worthless, Johnson says “Bulls**t”. He adds: “I know [African American law students at Yale] who got job offers all over the country.” Indeed, Lewis’s interviews with Thomas’s contemporaries show that black students were offered jobs at elite firms including Cravath; Debevoise; Lord, Day & Lord in New York; and Hill & Barlow in Boston.

But Thomas says he was denied first-year associate positions at firms in Atlanta, D.C., Los Angeles and New York. So what accounts for Thomas’s difficulties? Thomas’s classmates suggest a variety of reasons, ranging from mediocre grades to his hardscrabble upbringing to his resentment of what he viewed as “liberal white hypocrisy, condescension toward and underestimation of blacks.”

AmLaw says Thomas didn’t respond to a request for an interview.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 05, 2008 (boomark / email).