Legacy admissions, the practice of favoring applicants with parents who are alumni has long faced criticism as “affirmative action for the privileged.” Once a fixture in elite education, it’s being reexamined as affirmative action falls. Where does legacy admissions stand within law schools, and how has the history of affirmative action case law shaped it? FindLaw breaks it down.
Two Systems…
Despite their origins on opposite sides of the equity debate, both policies have shaped who gets access to opportunity.
Affirmative action for race-conscious admissions was born out of the Civil Rights Movement, intended to counteract generations of exclusion by giving underrepresented minority students a fairer shot at elite institutions. Legacy admissions, on the other hand, emerged as a tool for preserving the status quo, decades earlier in the 20s. Universities sought to favor the children of alumni, originally as a covert means to limit Jewish enrollment and, more broadly, to maintain white Protestant dominance.
Affirmative action aimed to diversify campuses and address historic injustice; legacy preferences have consistently benefited applicants from wealthier, whiter backgrounds, often at the expense of both minority and first-generation students. Given this, you’d think that if one of these policies would get struck down by a court, it would be legacy admissions.
…Two Standards
In reality, though, the irony is glaring. While affirmative action was repeatedly challenged in courts for allegedly violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, legacy admissions quietly persisted.
It came to a head in 2023 when the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions nationwide in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The majority opinion reasoned that considering race in admissions was unconstitutional, favoring some individuals over others based solely on race. Yet, legacy preferences survived untouched.
Why? Unlike affirmative action, legacy admissions do not explicitly classify applicants by race or ethnicity. Instead, they are framed as “fostering alumni loyalty” or “boosting donations” or the like. The Court did not address legacy admissions directly, leaving them outside the scope of its ruling.
But the demise of affirmative action had ripple effects. The SCOTUS decision didn’t just end affirmative action; it exposed the hypocrisy embedded in college admissions.
Rising Pushback
With one form of preferential treatment banned, public scrutiny intensified around legacy admissions. Democratic and Republican legislators began asking why universities should still give an edge to applicants whose only distinguishing feature is family pedigree. If race can’t be considered to help those historically excluded, why should ancestry be used to reinforce privilege?
Empirical research backs up these concerns: eliminating legacy admissions has a statistically significant impact on decreasing white enrollment and increasing non-white enrollment — often more so than banning affirmative action itself. Case studies at UT Austin and UIUC show that diversity increased after legacy bans were implemented, even when that wasn’t the explicit goal.
States like Colorado, Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, and California have since moved to ban legacy preferences at public institutions (and sometimes private ones). Advocacy groups filed federal complaints against schools like Harvard, arguing that legacy policies perpetuate racial disparities.
And while the national conversation about legacy admissions has grown louder, some institutions have quietly taken action.
Yale Law’s Quiet Shift
Yale Law School, for instance, offers a glimpse of what dismantling legacy preference can look like behind closed doors. Over more than a decade, the Law School gradually became legacy-blind. The shift wasn't trumpeted in press releases or etched into official policy statements, but rather unfolded through faculty deliberation and incremental change.
In general, law schools treat legacy admissions differently from undergraduate colleges. While legacy status at elite undergraduate institutions can substantially boost an applicant’s chances, law schools rarely grant any meaningful advantage for legacy connections. Most have phased it out entirely, only considering it in rare cases when the applicant’s family is particularly prominent or influential.
But Yale was the exception. According to professors who served on admissions committees, legacy applicants to Yale Law once received a small but meaningful boost: an extra point in a numerical scoring system, or an additional read of their file. Yale Law professor Akhil Reed Amar said that in those times, “perhaps five applicants each year” were admitted with that legacy boost.
That advantage was whittled away little by little, primarily through decisions by its faculty admissions committee. In recent years, children of alumni received no preference at all. Today, the application doesn't even ask about family ties to Yale. The same cannot be said for Yale’s undergraduate counterpart, where legacy status still confers an edge and is openly acknowledged in admissions statistics.
Progress is Promising
Faculty members describe widespread support for the shift to a system of "merit and not blood" as the guiding principle for admissions. Yet, there was no public announcement for such a significant change, and even donors and alumni were surprised to learn that the old system had been retired. For some, like Destiny Lopez LAW '21, who worked in admissions as a diversity representative, the change was invisible—assumed to be in place simply because it was standard practice elsewhere.
It’s possible that the change was kept under wraps for a reason. After all, Yale wasn’t exactly ahead of the curve in making progressive policy changes; it was only catching up to most other law schools that had ended their legacy boosts years before. The real forerunners of law schools to phase out legacy-based admissions boosts were typically part of broader university or state-level reforms.
Notably, the University of California system (which includes UC Berkeley and UCLA law schools) banned legacy preferences as part of statewide reforms in the late 90s. In more recent years, law schools at public universities in Colorado (after the state banned legacy admissions in 2021) were among the first in the nation to eliminate the practice explicitly for law schools. Last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1780 to extend the legacy ban to private schools within the state.
In the post-affirmative action era, legacy admissions stands out as one of the last, most glaring forms of inherited privilege in elite education. But the horizon seems promising for steady if slow progress, as states and institutions continue to reevaluate their practices. Law schools, at least, have successfully shed the cobwebs of legacy admissions.
Related Resources:
- Has the Supreme Court's Decision on Affirmative Action Affected College Enrollment? (FindLaw’s Law and Daily Life)
- Affirmative Action and College Admissions (FindLaw’s Learn About the Law)
- Can the LSAT Stand the Test of Time? (FindLaw’s Practice of Law)
