Althouse: A study of 61 groups of lawyers by practice area determines that the most liberal group is...

August 30, 2015

A study of 61 groups of lawyers by practice area determines that the most liberal group is...

... law professors.

The only surprise is that law professors were considered "lawyers" in a "practice area."

33 comments:

Chuck said...: Time to revisit the quote from Justice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas:

"Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. I noted in an earlier opinion the fact that the American Association of Law Schools (to which any reputable law school must seek to belong) excludes from membership any school that refuses to ban from its job-interview facilities a law firm (no matter how small) that does not wish to hire as a prospective partner a person who openly engages in homosexual conduct. See Romer, supra, at 653."; 8/30/15, 7:08 AM
Mick said...: Color me surprised. "Law prof" is a misnomer in most cases, including here, where the law prof has little or no experience outside of the Ivory Tower. Most were Usurper supporters. How can they be "Constitutional experts" while supporting an illegal POTUS? i.e Althouse, Turley, Tribe. What could their students possibly be learning?; 8/30/15, 7:08 AM
David said...: Of course it's a practice area. Practicing lawyers are advocates. As are lefty law professors. Neutrality, cruel or otherwise, is so out of fashion.; 8/30/15, 7:13 AM
Chris403 said...: Teaching two class per semester with summers off is nice work, if you can get it.; 8/30/15, 7:21 AM
Ann Althouse said...: I'm out of practice.; 8/30/15, 7:33 AM
JCC said...: Kindly note the contrast with "DA/prosecutor." (my bias)

Apparently, government service disqualifies.

There was a time - gone now? - when young lawyers might seek employment with, say, the U S Attorney's Office, prosecuting bad guys for a couple of years as a form of public service before heading for a career. Good experience too. As noted, law schools self-select to maintain the DNA.; 8/30/15, 7:48 AM
paminwi said...: No, you're really not. You're practicing law by teaching it, and I am sure with a bent that you can't even see.; 8/30/15, 7:48 AM
sykes.1 said...: This is not surprising. University faculty are screened before hiring for political views, and only lefties are accepted.

I once had a female colleague who went from office to office vocally protesting offering a visit to a candidate because he indicated on Facebook that he was an evangelical Christian. This same colleague bragged that she did not accept male graduate students as her advisees. This in an engineering college.; 8/30/15, 7:51 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: I was a bit surprised that IP lawyers ended up right in the middle. Must be the liberal IP attys thinking they are liberal entertainment attys compensating for more conservative patent attys. And why the latter (if indeed true)? Having to deal on a day-to day basis with the federal govt, which often means senseless rules, and much too often, with lazy, incompetent, unionized govt employees.; 8/30/15, 7:51 AM
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...: Interestingly, it's the area where being wrong has no consequences.; 8/30/15, 8:11 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Why are law profs so far to the left? The first obvious answer is the pretty egregious self-selection -,the left took control of legal academia, and isn't about to allow conservatives to regain a foothold. Making this all worse is that law schools seem to be greatly prioritizing diversity over competence and hard work these days,nwhich is a luxary that other facets of the law do not have.

But I would suggest something else is also active here. From a paper credential point of view, they are the best and brightest law school grads. Most have the credentials to be hired as associates at top law firms (as Ann was hired), where they could expect to make a half million or more by their mid 30s or so, if they make partner. Instead, if they work a bit over 7 or so years, they have a secure job with not overly much pressure for as long as they want it (one law prof who taught my father taught into his 90s).

But something else may at work here. They know that they are the best and the brightest, but have never been put in a position where they could fail. So many of them end up believing that they are smart enough and awsome enough that they could run this country much better than the normal citizenry could. Sound familiar? It should -,this country has been grossly mismanaged by a part time legal academic and part time commnity organizer who, despite 6+ years of abject failure, still thinks that he is doing a superb job at running the country. To this day, he seems to have no idea what he doesn't know, and studiously ignores the fact that those many bureaucratic failures are his responsibility are his responsibility, because the employees involved all work for him. In short, if you want to understand why legal academics are so far to the left, just look at President Obama.; 8/30/15, 8:21 AM
Michael K said...: " In short, if you want to understand why legal academics are so far to the left, just look at President Obama."

I agree with your premise but Obama has never been a "law professor" nor has he had any academic achievement. He is a cipher.; 8/30/15, 8:43 AM
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...: Michael K said...
I agree with your premise but Obama has never been a "law professor" nor has he had any academic achievement. He is a cipher.

He is also an Affirmative Action consequence, and possible scholarship fraud.; 8/30/15, 8:50 AM
Bay Area Guy said...: Law Professors are liberal? Wow, Who'd a thunk it; 8/30/15, 8:59 AM
Michael K said...: "He is also an Affirmative Action consequence, and possible scholarship fraud."

Fauxcahontas shares that background but IS a law professor.; 8/30/15, 9:03 AM
Temujin said...: In other news, the sun rose in the east today. Some say it was unexpected.; 8/30/15, 9:27 AM
JackOfVA said...: There's also a symbiotic relationship involved. My area of practice was regulatory law (telecommunications) and without the FCC and the various state public utility commissions, there would be no need for telecommunications lawyers.

Hence, while a logically consistent position for a regulatory lawyer might be to abolish the agency before which he or she practices, success would result in working yourself out of a job.; 8/30/15, 9:33 AM
Skipper said...: "Those who cannot do, teach."; 8/30/15, 10:26 AM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: I understand the conservative/liberal divide as something that roughly (very roughly) stands as a proxy for Republican or Democrat.

After that, it's just a broad description for two sides in a live-action role-playing game. A distraction to flatter people into thinking that their personal opinions on matters of national or global importance are of any practical consequence whatsoever.

I've found it's pretty easy to go about my business without paying attention to such things.

I don't care much about inside baseball or the love lives of Hollywood celebrities either.; 8/30/15, 10:36 AM
Chuck said...: Professor, I am very surprised that you would doubt Law Professor as a legal practice area.

I have always regarded it as a legal practice area, and in all of my bar publications, legal journals, et cetera, law professors have always been categorized as a practice area.

This is a personal question, and I am not sure why it even needs to be asked or why you should answer it; but are you not a member of a bar association? I recall that you were in private practice for a time; am I mistaken? Were you a member of the New York Bar? That state bar association has changed, however, since you were in practice, right?

I presume that most of your UW colleagues are active members of the Wisconsin Bar, and that some dabble in the private practice of law. (Absolutely nothing wrong with that and indeed I think it is commendable if not advisable.) At Michigan's Law School, I think almost all of the faculty are licensed as attorneys, mostly in Michigan but some in other states as holdovers from their days as young lawyers.

I suppose I should point out for non-lawyers something which Professor Althouse knows well; you take the Bar Exam in one of the fifty states after you've graduated law school, and thereafter you must pass that state's character and fitness investigation (often getting fingerprinted in the process). You take an oath, and are sworn in as a member of the bar and an Officer of the Court in that state. And after that you pay annual dues and often there is a requirement of continuing legal education (X number of credit hours per year).

So it's no stain on Professor Althouse if she elected to deactivate her membership in a state bar association like New York where she no longer lives or works. And it's easily imaginable that her joining the Wisconsin Bar is just a bother and a needless expense.; 8/30/15, 11:06 AM
Anonymous said...: It's just as bad in the business schools. If you've worked in the private sector, you will NOT be considered for a position on the faculty.

Face it, folks: it's just a revival of the worst aspects of Scholasticism.; 8/30/15, 11:08 AM
Beldar said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/30/15, 11:52 AM
Beldar said...: In addition to "law professors," there are quite a few other very peculiar, and sometimes quite arbitrary, definitions of "practice groups" in this survey paper, which is nevertheless at least mildly interesting.

It's no surprise to me that of the three authors, one is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford (with a political science Ph.D. from NYU); another, an assistant professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (with a JD from Stanford, a government Ph.D. from Harvard, and some other stuff); and the third, an assistant professor at Chicago Law (with a JD and political science Ph.D. from Harvard). Thus do tenure-seeking academics make classifications about members of a profession that, apparently, they've none of them ever practiced themselves. They explain (at page 45 of their paper):

"We begin by examining the ideology of lawyers based on their practice area. To do so, we rely on the practice areas that are listed on attorneys’ profiles in the Martindale-Hubbell directory. It is important to note that some lawyers in the directory do not have any practice areas listed while other lawyers in the directory have several listed. Moreover, the available categories may not be consistently used. For example, even if two lawyers both work on the same deals, the practice area for one attorney may be listed as 'Mergers & Acquisitions' while another may be listed as 'Corporate Law.' Finally, it may be the case that missing practice area information is not random. In other words, our data on practice areas may be biased because this information may not be equally likely to be available for all attorneys."

Before the internet, Martindale-Hubbell (now Martindale.com) was the leading national legal directory, and it was indeed, for that era, a very good source of information about lawyers, especially practicing lawyers. It's always been, though, a paid directory -- for many years, it was the principal form of advertising permitted to lawyers -- and so the comprehensiveness and accuracy of its information has always depended, and still depends, very much on who's bothered to update and annotate his/her entry. Lawyers and firms that are buying the more-than-minimal entries that Martindale sells are far more likely to include specifics like practice areas; those who don't buy the expanded entries (aka advertisements) may or may not be accurately represented there, and in general will have vastly less detail.

And as the authors properly point out, many lawyers are identified in Martindale's listings -- either based on sketchy information Martindale has derived from other sources, or from the lawyers' own self-descriptions -- as being in multiple practice areas. How has that been controlled for, if at all? They authors don't say. They assert that "[w]ith these caveats in mind, examining the relationship between practice area and lawyers’ ideology can still reveal interesting -- although imperfect -- information."

Practicing trial lawyers, however, if cross-examining such experts on the witness stand, would likely be successful in re-casting that assertion to be "interesting -- but barely probative -- information."

That's still probably good enough to move these folks a notch further toward tenure at their respective highly-respected institutions, though.; 8/30/15, 11:58 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "This is a personal question, and I am not sure why it even needs to be asked or why you should answer it; but are you not a member of a bar association? I recall that you were in private practice for a time; am I mistaken? Were you a member of the New York Bar? That state bar association has changed, however, since you were in practice, right?"

I was admitted to the New York bar but check the box for "retired from the practice of law." If I took clients while being a lawprof, I'd consider myself to be practicing law, but I don't. Judges are also not practicing law, by the way.; 8/30/15, 12:34 PM
Ann Althouse said...: Check the box on the forms I get from New York, seeking info and dues from me.; 8/30/15, 12:35 PM
MayBee said...: It's interesting, because journalists always use Law Professors as the go-to source to explain whether something is legal or not. So they spread the liberal thinking through the population.; 8/30/15, 1:54 PM
Steve M. Galbraith said...: Ever notice that the less accountable a profession/occupation is the more liberal it is?

As the Marxists used to say (I suppose they still do), "It is no accident.....; 8/30/15, 3:01 PM
cubanbob said...: Decent pay and benefits, not too much stress and job security. Yes it's easy to liberal/marxist in such an enviroment.; 8/30/15, 4:30 PM
Paul said...: And Obama is a.. what? Law professor?

And he is Socialist/Marxist.

Makes one think of those jokes about busses of lawyers, cliffs, and empty seats.; 8/30/15, 4:38 PM
sinz52 said...: According to the article, "personal injury protection" lawyers are, on the average, more conservative than bank attorneys.

That's a surprise to me. I always figured that those ambulance-chasing lawyers were liberal activists.; 8/30/15, 6:44 PM
FullMoon said...: Skipper said... [hush][hide comment]

"Those who cannot do, teach."
One of the most stupid cliches ever.; 8/30/15, 8:49 PM
jacksonjay said...: I would note that the last two Democrats to serve as President served as law profs in an earlier life. Both were particularly adept at twisting the law to suit their purposes! Hmmmmmmm!; 8/30/15, 9:23 PM
JimB said...: Nothing new here. I recall an argument with a law professor way back in 1959 who postulated that the US should unilaterally do away with nukes to "show a good example". He had no idea of how to negotiate.; 8/31/15, 10:55 AM