A brilliant one-liner:
"As the Anglican church was once described as the Tory Party at prayer, the legal academy today is best seen as the Democratic Party at the lectern."
So writes Northwestern law professor John McGinnis in an article on his study of law professors' political campaign contributions. The results of McGinnis' survey of professors at America's top-22 law schools show that 80 percent of professors who donate to political campaigns give predominantly or exclusively to Democratic candidates.
There's no doubt that, as McGinnis puts it, "mainstream conservative ideas are no better represented than those on the leftist fringe," but why is that the case? Simple bias or is something else going on?
That question was a widely discussed on on this blog back in its early days. I summarized a bunch of blog posts (and feedback from comments) in my TCS column Network Effects: Liberals and Conservatives in the Academy, which rejected conventional arguments about liberals being smarter or more altruistic, and argued that:
Actual bias is a problem, but probably isn't as much a one as conservatives outside the academy would like to believe. As Volokh Conspiracy blogger Juan Non-Volokh observed: My experience in the academy ... confirms [that most] of the hostility faced by conservatives (and libertarians) is not explicit, and often not conscious or deliberate. Mine too, although there have been a fair number of questionable moments.
The real culprit is the law school hiring process. Each fall the Association of American Law Schools collects resumes from prospective law teaching candidates, which are then transmitted to the appointments committee of each law school. The members of that committee then face the unenviable task of winnowing down well over a 1000 applications to a list of 25 or so candidates with whom the committee will meet at the so-called "meat market" convention. After which, the committee must further winnow those 25 or so down to a smaller number, 3-5, who are invited out to the law school for on campus interviews.
As a result, 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 committee member is enough to exclude someone. At the early stages of the process, they barely need to posit a reason.
In my experience, it thus is a lot harder to get somebody hired than it is to block them from being hired. The process isn't as explicit as the blackballing scene in Animal House, but the law school hiring process is just as weighted against hiring. (And I mean hiring anybody, regardless of political affiliation.) Any opposition (for whatever reason) therefore is usually enough, absent a very strongly committed pro-hiring faction.
In most cases, a candidates best chance of surviving the winnowing process is for someone on the committee to become the candidates champion. The champion will pull the candidates resume out of the slush pile and make sure it gets flagged for close review. Because most law schools lack a critical mass of libertarian and conservative faculty members, however, there is nobody predisposed to pulling conservative candidates' AALS forms out of the slush pile (and a fair number of folks inclined, whether consciously or subconsciously, to bury them). Applicants with conservative lines on their resume -- an Olin fellowship, Federalist Society membership, or, heaven help you, a Scalia clerkship -- thus tend to be passed over no matter how sterling the rest of their credentials may be.
In contrast, 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. Law school hiring tends to be driven by the self-perpetuating network of left-leaning senior faculty.
It may not be deliberate bias, but there still is a disparate impact.
