Latino Occupational Representation · Law

The Law Gap

Lawyers at 9.2%. Judges at 13.1%. The institutions that interpret and enforce the rules governing Latino communities are, at the professional level, staffed by people who did not come from those communities. In immigration court, criminal defense, and civil rights litigation, this gap has documented consequences for outcomes.

9.2%
Lowest-represented role
Lawyers
Source: BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg
15.8%
Average Latino share
across 5 occupations
vs. 20.0% U.S. Latino workforce share
80%
Occupations below the
20.0% workforce benchmark
4 of 5 occupations tracked
20.4%
Highest-represented role
Paralegals and legal assistants
Source: BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg
Of 1.3 million licensed attorneys in the U.S., fewer than 1 in 10 is Latino, in a country where Latinos are nearly 1 in 5 workers and nearly 1 in 4 people under 30.
All Occupations, Sorted by Latino Representation (lowest first)
Occupation Latino % · green line = 20.0% workforce benchmark Gap vs. benchmark Total employed Source
Lawyers
9.2% 		-10.8pp 1,146K BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg
Judges, magistrates, and other judicial workers
13.1% 		-6.9pp 57K BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg
Court, municipal, and license clerks
17.5% 		-2.5pp 64K BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg
Legal support workers, all other
18.9% 		-1.1pp 79K BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg
Paralegals and legal assistants
20.4% 		+0.4pp 486K BLS CPS Table 11, 2025 annual avg

Benchmark: 20.0% = U.S. Latino share of civilian labor force (BLS CPS 2025 annual average). California benchmark: 40.3% (CA Latino population share, 2020 Census). The green vertical line in each bar marks the 20.0% national workforce benchmark.

Your part in Law
The rules that govern Latino communities are argued and written by people, and most of them came from elsewhere. Your part: be counted, take the case or the clerkship that opens a door, and bring one more person from your community into the profession.
See your field's number and be counted →
See how this connects to the full story, across all industries, over time.
See the full data story →

Data & Methodology

These tables are the BLS Current Population Survey, in which people report their own occupation. Elsewhere on this site we cite the profession registries (AAMC for physicians, ABA for attorneys, LCDA for board seats), which count licensed members of a profession. The two disagree, and we show both rather than pick the flattering one: the CPS puts Latino lawyers at 9.2%, while the ABA, counting licensed attorneys, puts them at 6.0%. Where the two differ, the figure we stand behind and cite is the registry.

The parity line is 20.0%, the Latino share of everyone employed in America (BLS CPS 2025, Table 11). Occupations employing fewer than 150,000 people carry wide sampling error and are never used as a headline figure here.

Occupation data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey (CPS) Table 11, 2025 annual average. "Latino" = "Hispanic or Latino" per BLS CPS coding. All figures are annual averages of monthly survey estimates; small occupations (<50,000 workers) have higher margin of error.

Silicon Valley Technology figures sourced from cirlabs / Reveal News EEO-1 analysis of large tech employers, 2016 (most recent public EEO-1 release with race × job category × company detail). Internal job classifications differ from BLS CPS categories.

Gap = Latino % − 20.0% U.S. Latino workforce benchmark (BLS CPS 2025). Negative gap = underrepresented relative to workforce share. All data public domain. Script and source: github.com/turnerll/ligazon.