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.
