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According to a recent study, the number of Asian-Americans in top legal positions is nowhere near proportional to the number of Asian-Americans in the legal profession. The numbers are remarkable: three out of 94 U.S. attorneys, four our of 2,5000 elected state prosecutors, 26 of 850 federal judicial positions, and only 2 percent of the 10,300 state trial and appellate court judges are occupied by Asian-Americans.
Asian-Americans are the largest minority in major law firms, but they have the highest attrition rates and the lowest rates of becoming partners in those firms, compared to all other racial groups. While there are quite a few Asian-American lawyers, but those lawyers are not going on to top positions in the legal field.
This is problematic, because Asian-Americans are the fastest growing minority in the country, a little more than 5 percent of the population and growing, so to have so few important legal positions held by Asian-Americans means that an important viewpoint is missing from legal leadership. Such positions should, ideally, be at least representative of the way the nation’s population breaks down, meaning that at least 5 percent of these positions should be held by Asian-Americans. Otherwise, those people are not being represented fairly. Five percent of a group does not hold much power, meaning that in order for the experiences or concerns of Asian-Americans to be taken seriously in the upper echelons of the legal profession, it stands to reason that more than 5 percent of those positions need to be held by Asian-American legal practitioners.
The cause of the problem still eludes the scholars who performed the study that provided these numbers, but more than 80 percent of those Asian-American attorneys reported experiencing implicit bias in the workplace. “
Now we understand what’s happening,” Charles Huang, co-founder of the National Asian Pacific Islander Prosecutors Association, told the Associated Press. “We don’t know what’s causing it, but we know what the empirical results are.”
Why do you think Asian-Americans are so poorly represented in top legal positions? Do you have some insights on what can be done to change this? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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