By Dennis Crouch
UChicago Law Professors Adam Chilton and Eric Posner have a new article out that looks at political bias in legal scholarship. The basic finding is a correlation between a professor’s donation to a political party (Republican or Democratic) and that professor’s “scholarship ideology” (conservative or liberal).
We find that, at a statistically significant level, law professors at elite law schools who make donations to Democratic political candidates write liberal scholarship, and law professors who make donations to Republican political candidates write conservative scholarship. These findings raise questions about standards of objectivity in legal scholarship.