[VLM]

As helpful as that sounds, it still wouldn't help earlier in the pipeline effects such as policing (a fighting kid in a white school is just a fighting kid who gets de-escalated and a note sent home, a fighting kid in a black school is arrested automatically). Or another difficult early pipeline area is prosecution and plea bargains being racially different (the white kid gets a plea offer for municipal loitering, the black kid gets prosecuted for misdemeanor possession of burglary tools).

Explosive growth in income inequality makes the debate meaningless. There won't be grades of legal support, they'll just be billionaires who above the system and dirt poor peasants who get no support at all. Now (or recently) is probably not a good cultural era to go into the defense attorney field, for example. Being a defense attorney in an era where no one needs or can afford a defense attorney is like being a really great star trek warp field engineer in 2015, thats nice but how do you pay your bills?

[anigbrowl]

That's why I dropped out of law school. I went to a large-ish legal conference and realized how utterly hopeless the odds were, and decided to cut my losses. I'm not proud of it but my mental health is too fragile for me to function effectively under those conditions, which makes me worse than useless as an advocate for anyone else.