Who's More Liberal, Law Professors or Their Students?

Several years ago, Adam Bonica (Stanford University), Adam S. Chilton (University of Chicago), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern University) and Maya Sen (Harvard University), published a paper showing that the legal academy is significantly more liberal than the legal profession. As I noted when the paper was first released, this was interesting because the legal profession itself is more liberal than the public at large.

The same authors have a new study, “Ideological Concordance Between Students and Professors,” looking at the alignment, or lack thereof, between law professors and law students. The abstract reads:

The largely liberal composition of American university faculties is frequently lamented in academic discourse and public debate, largely out of concern that professors “brainwash” younger generations with left-leaning principles. However, these complaints often fail to acknowledge that university students are also overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus possible that university professors are more liberal than the American public but more conservative than their students. In this article, we develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of students and professors in American law schools over more than a twenty-year period to estimate the degree of ideological concordance in the legal academy. We find that although professors have become more liberal over time, they have also become more conservative than their students.

Their assessment is largely backward looking, as the study relies upon data between 1988 and 2011, but it is interesting nonetheless. One has to wonder, however, whether anything has changed in the academy over the past fourteen years. Did law professors continue to become more liberal over this time? And, if so, did students as well?

One other thing worth noting is that the authors explicitly consider whether law professors are influencing the ideology of their students, and conclude that this is unlikely. On this point, they write:

Another possible concern with the validity of our results is that the correspondence between student and professor ideology may be driven by professors having a causal impact on their students’ ideology. The reason that this is a concern is that students largely make political donations after law school, and any correspondence between professors and students could be driven by the students’ ideology being moved by the professors’ ideologies.

Although it is certainly possible that professors exert some influence on law students’ political views, we believe this is unlikely to be sufficient to drive our results. Importantly, although there is some evidence of peer effects on ideology from college students’ roommates (Strother et al., 2021), there is no general evidence suggesting that exposure to a liberal environment in college moves students to become more liberal (Mariani and Hewitt, 2008). Moreover, by the time students attend law school, it is more likely that their ideology is stable (Green et al., 2004; Bonica, 2014). Relatedly, there is evidence that judges do not affect the ideology of their law clerks (Bonica et al., 2019). Although law school is likely an important life experience, clerking is typically thought to be an intense experience where recent law graduates work in extremely close quarters with judges. If clerking does not change a recent law graduate’s ideological leanings, it is reasonable to think that law professors also would not have a large influence.

To investigate the possibility that professors may be having a causal impact on their students’ ideology in our setting, we compare students’ CFscores from donations made during and before law school to CFscores from donations made after law school. More specifically, Column 3 of Table 3 regresses CFscore based on all donations after law school on CFscore of all donations during or before law school, and Column 4 regresses CFscore based on donations within 10 years after law school on CFscore of all donations made during or before law school. We find that CFscores before law school strongly predict the CFscores after law school (a 0.77:1 and 0.70:1 relationship between these measures), suggesting that reverse causation is unlikely to be driving our results.

As with everything this quartet produces, the study is interesting. Alas, one of them has decided to become a Dean, so there may not be too many more of these papers coming.

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