An Empirical Study of Political Bias in Legal Scholarship

Abstract

Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large empirical literature on judicial behavior that has found that judicial opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join them. Yet no one has used statistical methods to test the parallel hypothesis that legal scholarship reflects the political biases of law professors. This paper provides the results of such a test. 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.

The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers

“…Third, law professor are more liberal than the attorney population. This effect is slightly smaller in magnitude than gender or government service but fully consistent with earlier studies on the topic (McGinnis et al 2005;Chilton and Posner 2015). Additionally, public defenders are more liberal than other attorneys.…”

“…Using this method, McGinnis et al (2005) examined campaign contributions made by law professors and found that they are overwhelmingly made to left-leaning political actors. More recently, Chilton and Posner (2015) found that law professors' political contributions predict the ideological leanings of their scholarship.…”

The Politics of Legal Empirics: Do Political Attitudes Predict the Results of Empirical Legal Scholarship?

“…It is worthwhile comparing the results obtained here with those of Chilton and Posner (2015). Chilton and Posner found bias among both sides -Republican legal scholars favored Republican positions and Democratic legal scholars favored Democratic positions.…”

“…A previous study by Adam Chilton and Eric Posner revealed that political orientation correlates with conclusions in legal scholarship (Chilton and Posner, 2015). These authors sampled ten legal scholars from each of 14 top law schools in the United States and had five law students review and rate five of their recent publications as favoring liberal or conservative positions, or as having no clear political position.…”

The Unreasonable Destructiveness of Political Correctness in Philosophy

“…For instance, in the context of American law, a statistical analysis made by political scientist Adam Chilton and legal scholar Eric Posner exposed that researchers who vote Democrat write more ideologically charged articles than researchers who vote Republican [44].…”