Northeastern University School of Law’s total enrolled Black students has sat around 7% of its entire student body since law schools began reporting data in 2011. This year, the amount of law students who identified as Black reached an all-time low of 4.8% of the student body, which reached 729 in 2024.

The number of first-year Northeastern School of Law, or NUSL, students identifying as Black dropped to eight — or just 3% of its first-year class — in 2024, which is the lowest since 2015, when there were seven. The drop comes one admissions cycle after the United States Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ruling, which effectively prohibits universities from considering race as a factor in admissions. Concerns about diverse incoming classes at Northeastern spread following the elimination of affirmative action when Black undergraduate student enrollment dropped by 35% for the class of 2028.

Between 2022-23 and 2023-24, the enrollment of first-year Black students at NUSL decreased from 11 to eight, according to data from the American Bar Association, or ABA.

“Like all colleges and universities in the U.S., Northeastern was required to change its admissions protocols to comply with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling,” Renata Nyul, Northeastern’s vice president for communications, wrote in an email to The Huntington News. “We continue to place tremendous value on the educational benefits of a diverse student body, and seek to enroll students from a broad range of life experiences within the bounds of the law.” 

In total, there were 265 students in NUSL’s 2024 first-year class, according to the data, which the ABA started requiring accredited law schools to report in 2011. NUSL officially reported that 18.9% of first-year students identify as a person of color, while 47.5% of students identified as white and 33.6% of students were labeled as “Race and Ethnicity Unknown.”

Since 2021, when 22 students who identified as Black made up 9.2% of the first-year class, NUSL’s reported enrollment of Black students has continued to steadily decline. This year marks the first time since 2019 that first-year enrollment has dropped to less than 10 students; in 2019, it enrolled nine.

The 4.8% statistic at Northeastern is lower than several nearby law schools; in 2024, Black students constituted 5.4% and 9% of the total law school student enrollment at Boston University and Boston College, respectively. This year, Harvard Law School’s Black student enrollment decreased by half, sitting at 3.4%. 

Despite the decline in Black student enrollment, the total student population of NUSL has continued to increase. This year, NUSL enrolled a total of 729 students, an increase of 166 since 2017. Total application numbers have also risen; NUSL received 4,133 total applications this year, a 40% increase compared to the 2016 application cycle.

Kiana Pierre-Louis, the associate dean for equity, belonging and student affairs at NUSL, did not respond to requests for comment from The News. 

Aliza Hochman Bloom, an assistant professor of law at NUSL who specializes in criminal law and procedure and the Fourth Amendment, said a diverse legal field is important for preparing the next generation of lawyers. Last year, the ABA reported that just 5% of lawyers in the U.S. identify as Black. 

“I think the classroom and the breadth of life experiences, which includes racial experience, class experience and perspective geographic experience matters a lot when you’re learning law,” Hochman Bloom said.

Such diversity in a classroom plays a large role in the learning experiences of Hochman Bloom’s students when discussing how race and law are intertwined, she said. From the early roots of racism in criminal law to the current state of law enforcement, these issues are consistently discussed in her class.

“I think in our current climate, it is more important than ever that we are training people to become lawyers who are able to operate within a system,” Hochman Bloom said. “And I really strongly believe that you need to know the tools of the system in order to change it in order to inform it, in order to reimagine it.”