PHOENIX — If you’ve got excellent grades, a stunning score on your Law School Aptitude Test and a remarkable background, odds are you’ll have no trouble getting into either of the law schools at Arizona’s public universities.

 If, however, your application doesn’t stand out quite that much, the schools will look at other factors to determine if you’re one of the small percentage of applicants who gets in the door. And included on that list is your racial or ethnic background.

 But that could come to an end in a little more than a year: An initiative drive being launched this coming week will ask voters to constitutionally bar state and local governments from considering race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin employment, contracting — and, in education.

 The measure is the work largely of Ward Connerly, a former member of the California Board of Regents who convinced voters in his own state to adopt a similar measure in 1996 banning programs that use those factors to give preference to — or discriminate again — applicants. He now is taking that campaign to eight other states.

 Max McPhail, executive director of Connerly’s campaign in Arizona, said the papers will be filed this week with the Secretary of State’s Office, allowing the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative to begin gathering the 230,047 signatures they need by July 3 to put the measure on the 2008 ballot. State officials have said there are no preferences in hiring or contracting. But the situation is somewhat different at law schools, where the number of applicants far exceeds the number of spaces available.

 Patricia White, dean of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University said being a minority, by itself, won’t get an applicant in the door.

 But she said her school looks beyond the easily quantifiable measures of grade point averages and LSAT scores to factors like a person’s background and work experience, letters of reference and even each applicant’s personal statement.

 In fact, Toni Massaro, her counterpart at the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law, said LSAT scores are, at best “have modest predictive value of performance in the first year.’’

 “But we over and over again see applications from people who have had life experiences where, if you look at the whole record, you say, ‘You know what? I think this person is going to outperform just the numerical indicators,’ ‘’ Massaro said.

 Both schools get applications from people who their review committees conclude immediately are qualified while other applications are set aside.

 It is with the remainder that admissions committees of faculty, students and staff use more subjective criteria to figure out which of the requests for admission — 3,100 at ASU for 160 slots and up to 2,800 for 150 at UA — are granted.

 “It’s not a precise science,’’ said White. Some of it just comes down to balance.

 “It’s a little like putting together a dinner party,’’ she said. For example, she said age is a factor. “You’re not going to have a class that consists of very similar 23-year-olds who didn’t leave Maricopa County,’’ she said.

 Where students grew up, whether they speak another language, their work experience and their economic, ethnic and racial backgrounds also matter. “Law is an inherently social, society-accountable profession,’’ said Massaro. “So it’s important for us to have a student bod that is diverse in a really broad sense of that term.’’ McPhail said diversity is a good thing. But he said it should come “not at the expense of where someone is being judge differently because of their race or their gender.’’

 But Massaro said these factors are important for not just the education of the particular student admitted but the rest of the class. Consider, she suggested, teaching constitutional law to a class which includes a Native American student from a reservation with different cultural and legal traditions.

 “It’s a positive value that informs the class discussion,’’ she said.

 The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed law schools in particular to consider race in admissions, most recently in a 5-4 opinion written in 2003 by then U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who upheld the admission practices of the University of Michigan to gain diversity.

 “The benefits are not theoretical but real,’’ O’Connor wrote. “American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas and viewpoints.’’

 “We like to have all of those groups represented because so much of what we talk about in law involves empathy with and understanding of a variety of different groups,’’ agreed White. “Sometimes you’re not going to find that in a single student,’’ she continued. “But if you put them all together you can end up having discussions that reflect a lot of difference of opinion.’’ The idea of relying on more than things like LSAT scores is endorsed by Daniel Bernstine, president of the Law School

 Admission Council, the organization that administers those tests. Bernstine, a supporter of affirmative action at law schools, blamed much of the reliance on test scores on the desire of some law schools to score well in the annual rankings of U.S. News and World Report  which is heavily weighted on both LSAT scores and grades.