Most law schools of which I am aware talk a lot about diversity, but they are amazingly non-diverse institutions:
In 2015, Professor James Lindgren published one of the most comprehensive demographic studies of the legal academy that has been produced to date. He found that the groups most underrepresented on law faculties are Republicans, Protestants, and Catholics.
Indeed, these three underrepresented groups (Republicans, Protestants, and Catholics) make up 91% of the U.S. population ages 30-75, but only about half of the law professor population. Put another way, people who are neither Christian nor Republican make up only 9% of the U.S. population, but account for about half of law professors (51%).
This deficit in political and religious diversity is particularly remarkable given the legal academy's success in recruiting and retaining women and racial minorities.
[A]ffirmative action has been such a success that all large ethnic and gender groups are at a minimum approaching parity with the lawyer population. Except for some very small groups of less than 2% of the population, in 2013, there is no group defined solely by ethnicity or gender that shows substantial underrepresentation in law teaching compared to lawyers, and only Hispanics (at about 54% of parity) show any substantial underrepresentation in law teaching compared to the English-fluent full-time working population. Even Hispanics-- the only large ethnic group to be substantially below parity with the English-fluent working population--are at full parity with their percentages among lawyers and at full parity with the highly educated working population.
Interestingly, ... Professor Lindgren found the greatest disparity between the number of white Republican women in law teaching and their representation in the legal profession as well as the general working population. Add in religious commitment and Lindgren found “there were more socialists in my survey than there were white female Republican Protestants (the largest four-way group in the U.S. population). As to religion, there were also “more Buddhists and more ‘pagans,’ who believe in many gods, than white female Republican Protestants.” It is also true that there were “more Buddhists and more ‘pagans”’ than white female Republican Catholics.
Professor Lindgren provides new research regarding the religiosity of law faculty in his contribution to this symposium. And it is not encouraging. Based on a survey of law faculty drawn from the AALS 2016-17 Directory of Law Teachers, Professor Lindgren concluded that law professors were almost six times more likely to agree with the statement “I don't believe in God” than members of the general public. They were also two and a half times more likely to agree with the statement “I don't know whether there is a God.” Christian law professors felt less free to express their true beliefs at work than all others combined, with Catholic professors registering more discomfort than their Protestant colleagues.
While law faculties now exhibit substantial ethnic, racial, and gender diversity, they exhibit intellectual or political uniformity. Liberals appear to have a virtual monopoly on the legal academy, with substantial entry barriers for Christian and socially conservative candidates. Such imbalance is not unique to legal education, but, as others have warned, such imbalance bodes poorly for preparing our students to become members of the legal profession, representatives of clients, officers of the legal system, and public citizens having special responsibility for the quality of justice.
Teresa Stanton Collett, A Catholic Perspective on Law School Diversity Requirements, 15 U. St. Thomas L.J. 322, 328–30 (2019).
I find it difficult to express just how (hopefully righteously) angry this makes me. Maybe Rod Dreher is right and we need a Benedict Option Law School.
