An analysis of the The Bar Passage Study (BPS) reveals that minorities are both less likely to graduate from law school and less likely to pass the bar compared to whites even after adjustments are made for group differences in academic credentials. To account for these adjusted racial gaps in performance, some researchers put forward the “mismatch hypothesis,” which proposes that students learn less when placed in learning environments where their academic skills are much lower than the typical student. This article presents new results from the BPS that account for both measurement‐error bias and selection‐on‐unobservables bias that makes it more difficult to find a mismatch effect if in fact one exists. I find much more evidence for mismatch effects than previous research and report magnitudes from mismatch effects more than sufficient to explain racial gaps in performance.

This article contends that film and other forms of popular culture place enormously sensitive resources for practical reasoning at the disposal of students of politics and society. After an historical exploration of the role of cinematic representations of war and its aftermath in the development of American political culture, the article analyzes an increasingly complex, philosophically disturbing, and ideologically ambiva lent cinematic genre of the past two decades, films concerned with the American war in Vietnam. While Hollywood films about the Vietnam war to date have disclosed the psychological and subjective dimensions and the toll the war took, they have systematically concealed the tougher, more important moral and political lessons that that tragedy has to teach us. As a form of mass entertainment, films may not exist primarily to help teach us such painful lessons; that social science and political theory can show us that they might is one of this article's animating hopes.

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