The center used the freedom-of-information laws to get data from the three public law schools in Virginia — from the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and George Mason University. Consequently, it will be hard for the schools to deny the numbers themselves. If they're wrong, it's because the schools supplied bad data.

The data were then turned over to two independent social scientists, Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai of Rockville, Maryland. They crunched the numbers and wrote the report, "Racial and Ethnic Preferences at the Three Virginia Public Law Schools." The study, along with similar reports by CEO about undergraduate and medical-school admissions, is on its website.

If you thought that law schools would be less likely to play fast and loose with laws and precedents that cast a cold eye on blatant racial and ethnic discrimination, you would be wrong. In fact, of all the schools that CEO has studied — 47 undergraduate institutions, six medical schools, and now these three law schools — the University of Virginia School of Law wins the dubious distinction of discriminating the most.

At UVa, the odds favoring a black candidate over an equally qualified white candidate were an astonishing 731 to 1 in 1999 and 647 to 1 in 1998. William & Mary is no slouch when it comes to discriminating either: The odds ratio favoring blacks over whites there was 168 to 1 in 1999 and 351 to 1 in 1998.

To put it in other terms: In 1999, if you had an LSAT score of 160 and an undergraduate grade-point average of 3.25 — these are the two measures that law schools typically weigh most heavily in making admissions decisions-you had a 95 percent chance of getting into UVA if you were black, but only a 3 percent chance of getting in if you were white. At William & Mary, in 1999, if you had an LSAT of 155 and an undergraduate GPA of 3.0, your chances of getting in were 84 percent if you were black but only 3 percent if you were white. The black-white gap in GPA during the first-year of law school was greatest at William & Mary: six-tenths of a point on a 4-point scale.