@nostradumbass
The study is 2 decades old and was primarily about mismatch. Some people misinterpreted that and the conclusions that it was about. It's really important that people understand law school to understand this study.
The first thing to understand is that law school grades on a ranked curve. Your grades reflect your ranking in the class, not necessarily your grasp of the material. In a class of 20 kids, the professor will give the top 2 students an A, the next 5 students a B, the next 10 students a C, and the bottom 3 students a D. The grade distribution is established before the tests are taken. So, the A students and the D students could have 95% identical tests but there will be 2 As and 3 Ds, no matter what. It's meant to prepare lawyers for the reality that it doesn't matter how good your case is, the job is competitive. Someone wins, someone loses and the margins can be extremely small.
The second thing is about academic mismatch and that matters in light of the first thing. Law schools generally admit based on LSAT scores. And law students are generally told to go to the best law school that you get admitted to. However, knowing that some students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, they might be admitted to law schools where their LSAT scores put them in the bottom quartile of their class. Still within the admissions criteria but closer to the bottom.
This creates the "mismatch". If the best school the student gets into is also a school where their LSAT score is near the bottom, the ranking curve in the grading system almost guarantees that they'll be at the bottom of their law school class. This is independent of whether or not they've mastered the material. The gap between the top students and the C students is real but it's also manufactured.
This isn't as much of an issue in undergrad where students are often tested purely on if they know the material and can apply it.
Anyway, for the people who care about this stuff, there was a conversation back then about if the law school admission process was actually harming the production of black lawyers by creating this mismatch. And many black law students who would have been A students at one law school ended up as C students because they picked the best law school they could get into rather than the law school where their LSAT scores put them in top 10% of admitted students.
So understanding mismatch in law school is extremely important.
However, this has nothing to do with performance in the real world. And that's other part. The best lawyers are often not the best law students because much of the practice of law is not what is taught in law school. Law school is theoretical, it's memorization, it's very broad. Real law is practical, full of compromises and often very narrow. So plenty of phenomenal lawyers, white, black, etc., were not the best law students because real law and law school diverge immediately upon graduation.
None of that has any bearing on Lisa Cook. Her accomplishments are pretty straightforward. She's got ascertainable positions and she's written research papers that people can read and thus judge her scholarship.
Moreover, the alleged mortgage fraud, is sadly common in many, many high income households. It's still fraud and, if she's guilty, she should lose her job but I know far too many people who are doing the same thing to get better loan terms, lol. It's essentially the same thing Trump was accused of -- lying on banking documents to get better loan rates -- except this was residential instead of commercial.