The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity

Abstract

We compare the ideological balance of the legal academy to the ideological balance of the legal profession. To do so, we match professors listed in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers and lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory to a measure of political ideology based on political donations. We find that 15% of law professors, compared to 35% of lawyers, are conservative. After controlling for individual characteristics, however, this 20 percentage point ideological gap narrows to around 13 percentage points. We argue that this ideological uniformity marginalizes law professors, but that it may not be possible to improve the ideological balance of the legal academy without sacrificing other values.

The market for general counsel

“…One segment of the legal profession that may be far more Democratic-leaning than GCs is the legal academy. Bonica et al (2018) find that 75.7% of law professors donate exclusively to the Democrats, 12.6% give to both the Democratic and Republican parties, while just 11.6% exclusively donate to Republicans. standard deviation decreases in the overlap between an employer's donations and those of their firm's CEO increases the probability they leave their position by 10.1%.…”