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Research: Law Schools Skew Liberal, But Conservatives Also Land Prestige Jobs
Karen Sloan
The National Law Journal
p>Law schools hire more openly liberal professors than openly conservatives ones, but the plum jobs at the most prestigious schools don't appear to be going solely to the liberals.
That's the conclusion reached by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who analyzed the ideology of recently hired law professors. Their study, "Ideological Diversity and Law School Hiring," is the first to focus specifically on the political leanings of law professors.
Previous research concluded that law professors skew white and male, and tend to have completed their legal studies at top law schools.
The research by Douglas Spencer, a Ph.D. candidate in the law school's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, and law student James Phillips turned up no statistical correlation between job applicants' politics and the prestige of the hiring institutions — a finding they described as "encouraging."
Still, "the extreme discrepancy between the proportion of new professors who can be clearly identified as liberal or conservative indicates either unequal hiring patterns or environments less conducive to openness and debate in the law school setting," they wrote.
"Further research is needed to test these hypotheses and, if necessary, identify a remedy that will increase the intellectual diversity of American law schools, with ripple effects on the development of law in the United States and the world."
The researchers noted the recent praise for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan for increasing the political diversity of the Harvard Law School faculty while she was dean. Of 32 tenure or tenure-track hires, three were openly conservative — which illustrates the large ideological imbalance in law schools, according to the study. < ...
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