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Affirmative Action, The Bell Curve, And Law School Admissions, Ryan Fortson

Seattle University Law Review

This Article will view the relationship between affirmative action and law school admissions through the lens of The Bell Curve, a book suggesting that a genetic link probably exists between race and intelligence. In The Bell Curve, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein conduct a statistical analysis on a variety of aptitude tests and other measures of intelligence, concluding that blacks and whites do differ on standardized tests of cognitive ability, even when controlling for such factors as motivation and socioeconomic status. Indeed, much of the book is geared toward discounting environmental explanations of intelligence scores. The relevancy …