Sander (2019) attempts to revive the claim that “mismatch” between the credentials of students that receive racial preferences in law school admissions and the average observable academic credentials of their peers leads to fewer black lawyers. This article examines Sander’s study and explains the reasons why second-choice analyses, and Bar Passage Study data in particular, are poor sources for causal inferences about academic mismatch. Sander’s paper makes indefensibly strong assumptions about the inferences that can be drawn between evidence on distinct types of mismatch, overclaims results that lack robustness across different subsamples of the underlying data, and misinterprets other results that in fact cut against the article’s claim. Ultimately, as originally reported in Ayres & Brooks (2005), the data do not provide evidence that affirmative action reduces the number of black lawyers.

Sander (2019) 试图重申这样一种说法，即在法学院录取中接受种族偏好的学生的证书与同龄人的平均可观察学历之间的“不匹配”导致黑人律师减少。本文检查了 Sander 的研究，并解释了为什么第二选择分析，特别是 Bar Passage Study 数据，是关于学术不匹配的因果推断的不良来源。Sander 的论文对可以在不同类型不匹配的证据之间得出的推论做出了令人难以置信的强烈假设，夸大了在基础数据的不同子样本中缺乏稳健性的结果，并曲解了实际上与文章的主张相悖的其他结果。最终，正如 Ayres & Brooks (2005) 最初报道的那样，