Harvard Law School Enrolls More Black Students After 2024 Tumble

Harvard Law School enrolled a bigger cohort of Black first-year students this fall than a year earlier, reversing a decline that drew scrutiny to the elite school.

The number of Black first-year law students who joined the class of 2028 rebounded to be on par with the averages from 2020 through 2023, according to people familiar with the information, who asked not to be identified discussing unofficial data.

Last year, just 19 Black or African American first-year law students enrolled at the school, or 3.4% of the total class of 563, according to data from the American Bar Association. Over the previous four years, an average of almost 46 Black students joined each year, the data show.

After numbers dropped last year, the Harvard Black Law Students Association and Black alumni of the school stepped up efforts to try to recruit and encourage admitted students to enroll.

Read more: Harvard Law’s Path to Elite America Narrows for Black Students

While this year’s numbers haven’t been released, the early estimates provide a snapshot of enrollment at the school two years after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 that race couldn’t be used as a factor in college admissions. Harvard University was a named defendant in that case.

Harvard Law School spokesman Jeff Neal declined to comment on the latest numbers. In a statement last year when the class of 2027 data was made public, he said that conclusions drawn from one year of data are “necessarily limited.”

“We continue to believe that a student body composed of persons with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences is a vital component of legal education,” Neal said in the 2024 statement. “Harvard Law School remains committed both to following the law and to fostering an on-campus community and a legal profession that reflect numerous dimensions of human experience.”

Overall, total first-year enrollments at the school increased slightly this year to 579 students, the Harvard Law School website shows. The ABA’s enrollment statistics for the class of 2028, which include self-reported data on race that’s provided by each law school, won’t be made public until later this year.

Hundreds of alumni returned last weekend to Harvard Law for a celebration of Black alumni. Events on Friday included a conversation with Associate Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Class of 1996, who was honored with an award from the alumni association.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Janet Lorin in New York at jlorin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net

Elizabeth Fournier

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