Political Diversity on Law School Faculties.

Jim Lindgren, August 28, 2005 at 2:12pm

In an earlier post, I mentioned John McGinnis's forthcoming Georgetown Law Journal study of
political diversity on law faculties. Adam Liptak has a fair account of it in the New York Times:

The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records
reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by
U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but
of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to
Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.

The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the
most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of
Virginia, on the other hand, contributions were about evenly divided between the parties. The
sample sizes at some schools may be too small to allow for comparisons, though it bears noting
that by this measure the University of Chicago is slightly more liberal than Berkeley. . . .

Whatever may be said about particular schools and students, professors and deans of all political
persuasions agreed that the study's general findings are undeniable.

"Academics tend to be more to the left side of the continuum," said David E. Van Zandt, dean of
Northwestern's law school, where the contribution rate to Democrats was 71 percent. "It's a little
worse in law school. In other disciplines, there are more objective standards for quality of work.
Law schools are sort of organized in a club structure, where current members of the club pick
future members of the club."

Although not mentioned in the NY Times report, McGinnis's article also examines those letters
by groups of "experts," eg, the public letters favoring or opposing Clinton's impeachment or
opposing Bush v. Gore. Despite hundreds of signatories to the various letters, McGinnis said
only three professors (and I'm one of the three) has donated exclusively to candidates at odds
with the implied political orientation of the signed letter.

UPDATE [further Updated]: The Times article raises the question whether it matters if there is
political diversity on law faculties.

I have two answers--one substantive, one speculative. First, in my studies with the General
Social Survey, political ideology is the strongest predictor of views across a range of hundreds of
issues that I've looked at--stronger than race, gender, education, class, occupation, age, region,
marital status, etc. Those who say that labels such as "conservative" and "liberal" are
meaningless today are frankly uninformed. Most survey researchers know that these labels are
quite salient.

Second, a professor at the Harvard Law School told me that in 1988 he asked every member of
the Harvard Law School faculty with even a hint of conservative or Republican leanings whether
they favored or had voted for Bush in 1988. Only one had (1 out of 60-80 faculty); all others
favored Dukakis. He also said that in about 2 or 3 dozen entry-level faculty hires from the mid-
1970s through about 3 or 4 years ago (when they hired an entry-level conservative), the Harvard
Law School had not hired a single Republican.
Now consider this thought experiment: [Imagine that in 1988 all but one of the Harvard Law
faculty had favored Bush1 over Dukakis. And] Imagine that over the same period of a quarter
century [mid 1970s through early 2000s], the Harvard Law School had hired at the entry-level
only those who leaned Republican. Imagine how different the Harvard Law School would be,
how different legal education would be, how different the government (and public policy) would
be, populated with lawyers trained by an overwhelmingly Republican Harvard faculty. Somehow
I think it would be a different world.