UMass Amherst Researchers Awarded $511,000 NSF Grant for Research on Diversity and Networking in Law School

Anthony Paik, sociology, and Steve Boutcher, executive officer of the Law and Society Association and senior research fellow at the Institute for Social Science Research, are part of a team recently awarded a $511,000 grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund research examining diversity and networking in law school.

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Paik and Boutcher are joined on the project by lead principal investigator Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen, assistant professor of law and co-director of the Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession at University of California, Irvine School of Law, and co-principal investigator Carole Silver, professor of global law and practice at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

The researchers say that networking – the process of creating a professional support system of colleagues, mentors and connections – is a critical part of building a successful law career. While law students are encouraged to start growing their professional network in school, they say that students of diverse backgrounds – including race, gender, sexual orientation, national status or class – may not have the same access to “resource-rich” social networks. These “network inequalities” may impact the overall value of a legal education and lead to differences in career success after graduation.

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The grant, which supports research through February 2025, helps to continue research done as part of an earlier study on first-year law students that examined networking during law school. The new funds will help researchers identify how network inequalities in these same students may affect their early career development.

“We started following these students in the fall of their 1L year and surveyed them during the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Paik. “We are super excited to have the opportunity to track these students as they wrap-up law school and move into the legal profession.”

While this research centers on networking inequalities in law school and early legal careers, the work could be relevant to professions struggling with similar issues. The findings from this study could be used to create meaningful interventions and change in the legal profession and beyond in the hopes of eliminating such inequalities.

Full details about the grant and the research it supports, can be found on the NSF website.