How left do America’s law schools lean?
The National Association of Scholars has long tried to call attention to the rather shocking under-representation of Republicans at America’s law schools and the fact that actual conservatives were purged long ago. Democrats outnumber Republicans on faculty at a ratio of about 50 to 1, for example, and law professor political donations skew almost exclusively to progressive candidates. Law school publications routinely advocate not just abortion and euthanasia but gender ideology, illegal immigration, and every other pet cause of the political left. All this is said to be legal “scholarship” and is subsidized at state schools by tax dollars and at private schools by federal student loans, among other public subsidies, including Justice Department grants.
This is not the least bit surprising. I went to law school a long time ago, and it was already starting to be a trend although my guess is that things were roughly equal back then. My alma mater continues to send me its publication, and for years I’ve tracked the ever-leftward drift of its articles, until in recent years it’s become an utterly woke and worthless publication.
This absolutely has repercussions. Lawyers and lawsuits help form public policy, and in particular there’s a recent trend for the production of leftist election lawyers. Election law was something nearly unheard of when I was in law school – although obviously it existed, it just wasn’t on most people’s radar screens. Now it’s a big and influential business, as we learned in the 2020 election and its aftermath, and the right is trying to play belated catch-up.
A lawyer I correspond with has said that the curriculum of law schools is designed to train appellate judges, who form only a tiny minority of lawyers. He recommends one year of school, followed by an apprenticeship to a licensed attorney, followed by the bar exam.
To get from here to there, state law could shutter all extant law schools and debar the tenure-track faculty in the extant from employment in the state higher education system. The new faculty could be recruited from the ranks of working lawyers and retired lawyers.
To punish the faculty nomenklatura further, end the use of the baccalaureate degree as a screen for law school admission. Consider a 70-credit preparatory certificate program which encompassed courses in philosophy, courses in Anglo-American history which emphasize institutional development, and one course each in social psychology, rhetoric, political theory, accounting, finance, insurance, and real estate.
It’s an extreme manifestation of a general problem: we make use of higher education to sort the labor market. A century ago, this was done only of select occupations. In turn, higher education has decayed into a sandbox run for the benefit of tenured faculty and administrative microbes. They have contempt for their clientele and the broader public, and so merit harsh treatment.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mattwalsh-thedailywire-yaf-collegecampus/2021/11/30/id/1046817/
https://notthebee.com/article/saint-louis-university-is-threatening-to-expel-a-student-for-posting-off-campus-flyers-for-a-matt-walsh-event
For your consideration, some examples of the quality of human being employed in the higher education apparat. (What’s exasperating about these stories is that the names of the officials responsible are not published. They should be. Every time).
I attended a small, private law school in the Deep South.
There were many instances where I got the “stink eye” when I would bring up contrary points as we were going over cases and legal issues. Not my law professors. To their credit, they never treated me badly. (The faculty had one token conservative professor.) However, many of my fellow students treated me as if I were a leper in their midst. I didn’t care. I’ve always been willing to speak the truth as I perceive it.
Unfortunately, law schools are just one element of a huge wave that is engulfing our culture. If anyone knows how to block this wave, or even dampen it down, I would love to hear of it.
The Trump experience simply reminded us that elections are not necessarily effective long term. Like an invasive carcinoma, Progressivism (tongue in cheek) has insinuated itself into every element of influence and control. This culutural disease may be forced into temporary remission, but it is never eradicated.
I suppose that over the past several decades, while the general population was distracted by earning a living, or raising families, the agents of change were quietly, but diligently, laying the groundwork.
I think Art Deco is on to something. That proposal would also greatly reduce the cost to students. It doesn’t make any sense for students who want to be local practitioners to go (an extra) $200k in debt for a starting salary less than that of many undergraduate majors. The key would be opening the bar exam to those who do not had JDs from accredited law schools. Oddly, California is ahead of the game in that respect.
@Art Deco – I wonder haw many more states would have to follow suit before something like you propose would take off.
Oldflyer,
It goes back more than a century but really got going in the late 60s. That was when taking control higher education became an objective of the Left. They knew that taking control of institutions where those on the inside decided who would get to join the club, where firing was rare, and output could be fudged, was an easy target.
Once there, there became the push to make a college degree the only thing that employers could look at in hiring. EEOC got that done. Thus to get a good job now you have to pass through an indoctrination center and pay for that “privilege.” Quite an efficient and profitable political scam to gain power.
However, many of my fellow students treated me as if I were a leper in their midst
Alan Kors once offered that in his experience as a student and professor, the willingness of various parties to tolerate robust disagreement on campus saw it’s peak around about 1974. It seems to get worse every year.
Art Deco has a nice fantasy. My own is that a dominant Rep. Congress (2023?) “clarifies” the anti-discrimination laws to explicitly include forbidding discrimination based on Party policies – and make it easier to sue colleges for such discrimination based on “creed”.
Fantasy 2 concerns False Advertisement suits against colleges claiming “Diversity” but opposing the hiring of pro-life folk.
I certainly agree that shutting the schools down and rebuilding/ replacing them would be “faster” – but don’t see that happening, tho I would support it, too. Replacing Democrat (not “Leftist”) domination of accreditation by more objective standardized testing should be a huge push – possibly starting with accepting either.
Neo has long been talking about Gramsci, and more others are beginning to note the commie march thru the institutions and his influence.
Funny sad that neither Neo nor Steve Sailer include the other in their blogrolls, since there is a lot of idea overlap without too much POV, tho writing styles are also quite different.
I’m so, so disappointed with Creighton Law. I got into Twitter and Facebook disputes with the Dean, former Dean and a number of professors. All but the current Dean blocked me.
They are all far Left. In one incident, a prof opined that 1-6-21 was an insurrection. I took her to task for imprecision in language and sloppy thinking. She whined, the Dean defended her and she blocked me. I wish I could have blocked my professors from calling on me in class.
The latest incident was when a health care “expert” law professor opined in the OWH that Biden’s vax mandates were perfectly legal. I pushed back hard. I knew that the federal government has no police powers. The Biden Administration is 0-3. I knew in my legal gut that this wasn’t a close case.
My point here is that his health care law prof has allowed her liberal political views to cloud her legal judgment. I can only imagine her position on vaxing kids and allowing trans surgery on minors.
I completely sick about my beloved alma mater.
As lawyers loyal to the Constitution are a nearly extinct species,
Shakespeare’s quote from Henry VI: “THE FIRST THING WE DO, LET’S KILL ALL THE LAWYERS.” has simply become common sense. Disband the legal profession! True, chaos would result but when our current trajectory is considered…
As a tyranny that wraps itself in the law is worse than chaos.
Oldflyer,
“Unfortunately, law schools are just one element of a huge wave that is engulfing our culture. If anyone knows how to block this wave, or even dampen it down, I would love to hear of it.”
Three possibilities come to mind;
1) the coming republican primaries provide a larger percentage of conservative candidates who are voted into majority control of Congress. Followed by even further gains in 2024 along with De Santis winning election to the Presidency. Who immediately conducts a massive purge of all 3 letter federal agencies.
2) Civil War ll followed by an Article V Convention of the States
3) If all else fails, the ChiComs will block it… as snowflakes are incapable of defending America’s National Security.
@Michael Towns:
Your “small private law school in the Deep South” is perhaps Tulane in New Orleans, or Samford, in Birmingham. Tulane has long been know to draw Yankees down as students. Can’t speak to Samford on that.
Or Faulkner in Montgomery, AL: https://law.faulkner.edu/. On second thought, I think they had/have more than one conservative professor.
Funny sad that neither Neo nor Steve Sailer include the other in their blogrolls, since there is a lot of idea overlap without too much POV, tho writing styles are also quite different.
Sailer is the sane man in the Ron Unz bedlam. Even Sailer’s comment boards are chock a block with bizarre and poisonous effluvia.
Unlike most of his commenters, Sailer is not a genetic determinist. It’s just that he fancies biological factors in influencing human behavior are the only ones of interest to discuss. Neo’s balance of subjects differs and her approach to common subjects differs.
As for the style, Neo plays it straight. Sailer favors amused detachment and irony. I’ve never figured out if that’s his default state or it’s a performance.
Art Deco has a nice fantasy.
What fantasy?
It was not until the 1920s that the majority of superior court judges in my home town had a law degree. They took the bar examination after ‘reading law’ in an office. As late as 1944, the chief appellate judge in western New York was a man who had read law. John Van Voorhis, who sat on the terminal appellate court in New York, was a man who had read law. He retired from the bench in 1967. He said his father’s wish was that he not attend law school, as he was sufficiently theoretically inclined already. “I want you to learn law through the soles of my shoes”.
“state law could shutter all extant law schools and debar the tenure-track faculty in the extant from employment in the state higher education system.”
This is the Art Deco fantasy, ain’t gonna happen – tho I do like it.
I think Sailer’s irony started as a fun sort of performance that is now his default mental process.
I very much like that he writes what he thinks is true, usually with good reasons to show that it is- tho what he chooses to write about so often is that PC/Woke ideas are false, and/or such policies are terrible.
But yes, most of Unz is crazy, so I usually only read iSteve and hardly comment there – tho he has the best comment system. (Agree/Disagree, Reply, etc.)
These Neo comments, with 4 min to edit, are also great – and what the commenters here say is so much better than most other places.
This is the Art Deco fantasy, ain’t gonna happen – tho I do like it.
There’s nothing fantastical about it, you just fancy it’s unlikely. Waal, lots of things have happened in the last 20 years most of us would never have expected. Pretty relentlessly bad, but I figure our luck has to turn some time.
To Art Deco on figuring our luck has to turn sometime, if one is a Christian, it will be in the next life.
To Art Deco on figuring our luck has to turn sometime, if one is a Christian, it will be in the next life.
The next life is the seat of particular judgment and general judgment. Nothing left to chance there.
The accounting faculty at the NYC university where I used to teach was not completely left wing. The trick was to figure out which ones were right-thinking and then how to approach them without risking, you know, the others from finding out your leanings. But I exaggerate a bit, as I don’t recall there being much talk about “politics” although they did start up faculty seminars on institutional (you fill in the blank) to which you were encouraged by the dean to attend. On the other hand, the school was in NYC, so I suppose it was assumed that the faculty were of the favored political orientation.
Notre Dame Law School went left about two
decades ago, just not as far left as the rest.
Art Deco: I heartily applaud your plan for sorting out the legal profession. Of course there are a million practical objections, not least being the resistance of those with enormous vested interests —who wants to see their expensive diploma (suitable for framing) reduced to an obsolete curiosity?— but this is the kind of flak that proves we’re over the target. In any case, we can dream. We must.