Legal News

Liberal professors have an edge at law schools, says study

By Richard Binder

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law have released the first study to focus on the political leanings of law professors. Their conclusion? Law schools hire more openly liberal professors than openly conservatives ones.

The research by Douglas Spencer, a Ph.D. candidate in the law school's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, and law student James Phillips could not determine a clear ideological bent for 60% of the sample, yet the number of hires who were easily identified as liberal far outpaced those who were very clearly conservative. Spencer and Phillips determined that 52 of the hires were liberal, compared to 8 who were conservative ? a ratio that "doesn't speak well of intellectual diversity in American law school hiring."

The researchers, however, turned up no statistical correlation between job applicants' politics and the prestige of the hiring institutions ? a finding they described as "encouraging."

Full story at NLJ.com.

Full post as published by Legal Pad | LA on July 21, 2010 (boomark / email).