Over at Instapundit, Professor Reynolds has an excellent concise description of the law school hiring process. You will note from his discussion that the bulk of the process consists of winnowing down well over a 1000 applications to a list of 25 or so candidates to meet at the so-called "meat market" convention. Those 25 are then further winnowed down to 3-5 for on campus interviews.
This is the institutional background necessary to understanding the recent blogosphere debate over bias against conservatives in the academy. Regular readers will recall my take is that the absence of conservatives in the academy is a combination of at least three factors: (1) conservative preferences for the private sector; (2) deliberate bias in hiring; (3) disparate impact caused by the nature of the hiring process. Reynolds' description of the process should help you understand the last point. The hiring process is almost entirely negative. You spend the vast majority of your time winnowing the application pile -- i.e., finding reasons not to hire someone. If you have on-site interviews of 0.3% of the applicant pool, any opposition by any member is enough to exclude someone. At the early stages of the process, they barely need to posit a reason.
This is where the critical mass problem comes in. As I explained in an earlier post, for a candidate to survive the winnowing process, somebody has to pull their resume out of the slushpile and make sure it gets flagged for close review. Because most law schools lack a critical mass of libertarian and conservative faculty members, there is nobody predisposed to pulling conservative candidates' AALS form out of the slushpile (and a fair number of folks inclined, whether consciously or subconsciously, to bury it). Meanwhile the latest left-leaning prodigy from Harvard or Yale has a mentor at one of those schools who makes calls to his/her buddies and ideological soulmates at other law schools. The recipients of those calls then flag the prodigy's file, giving them a critical leg-up in the process. It is one of the few moments in the process when somebody is affirmatively trying to hire someone rather than just trying to get rid of the pile. And that, my friends, is why there would be a disparate impact even if there were no deliberate bias.
UPDATE: Brian Leiter of UTexas tries fisking my post here. There's a key concession from Prof. Leiter, though: "I am inclined to agree that law school hiring is more politically driven than hiring elsewhere in the academy ...." (Emphasis in original.) His criticism, moreover, is mainly directed at demonstrating that my "explanation of the institutional basis for the bias phenomenon is [not] generally applicable." In contrast, Professor Sollum of the Legal Theory Blog calls this a "nice post," which "is especially interesting for its accurate and insightful description of the law-school hiring process." (Emphasis supplied.) Even if Leiter's right, however, he still needs to explain the disparate impact shown by the Lindgren and McGinnis studies, and I'm not buying the stupidity explanation.
