We Win, They LoseThe Wit and Wisdom of Three Guys Named Brent, Mark and Mike
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
This Just In! Law Schools Are Liberal Bastions!!
At least, that's the conclusion of the study done by UC Berkeley School of Law Ph.D. candidate Douglas Spencer.
The National Law Journal goes with this headline: "Research: Law schools skew liberal, but liberals don't get all the prestige jobs" The actual study is a bit less nuanced, however. As the article notes, the researchers found that:
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.
The article continues:
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.
Spencer and Phillips compiled a sample of 149 entry-level, tenure-track hires made during 2005, 2007 and 2009. They assigned a measure of ideology for each hire based on political donations, Facebook profiles, work experience, publications and the political party of the president who appointed any federal judge for whom the professor clerked.
The researchers could not determine a clear ideological bent for 60% of the sample, yet the number of hires who were easily identified as liberal far outpaced those who were very clearly conservative. They determined that 52 of the hires were liberal, compared to 8 who were conservative — a ratio that "doesn't speak well of intellectual diversity in American law school hiring."
The findings suggest that conservative law professors may be more discreet about their political leaning early in their careers, the researchers said.
Gee, I wonder why conservatives would be "more discreet about their political leanings"? Maybe because they won't get hired?!
In the study, the researchers stated of Kagan's hiring of three conservatives:
However, that only three openly conservative law professors were hired among thirty-two others — and that three is considered an unusually high number — speaks to the ideological imbalance in the hiring process at Harvard Law, a process that is replicated at nearly every law school in America.
Anyone for a little diversity? Intellectual diversity, that is.
PS - Do not miss Table 3 (p. 24 of the download) in the study; it is eye-opening to say the least. If you want a clue as to why our country is going down the toilet, it is contained therein. In short, virtually all of our lawyers are "educated" by extreme liberals, and then set loose on the country to deform -- oops! I meant "reform" -- it in the image of their professors.