IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/harjfk/rwp17-023.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity

Author

Listed:
  • Bonica, Adam

    (Stanford University)

  • Chilton, Adam

    (University of Chicago)

  • Rozema, Kyle

    (Northwestern University)

  • Sen, Maya

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

We compare the ideological balance of the legal academy to the ideological balance of the legal profession. To do so, we match professors listed in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers and lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory to a measure of political ideology based on political donations. We find that 15% of law professors, compared to 35% of lawyers, are conservative. After controlling for individual characteristics, however, this 20 percentage point ideological gap narrows to around 13 percentage points. We argue that this ideological uniformity marginalizes law professors, but that it may not be possible to improve the ideological balance of the legal academy without sacrificing other values.

Suggested Citation

  • Bonica, Adam & Chilton, Adam & Rozema, Kyle & Sen, Maya, 2017. "The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity," Working Paper Series rwp17-023, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp17-023
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/getFile.aspx?Id=1543
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Adam Bonica & Maya Sen, "undated". "A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession," Working Paper 345856, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    2. repec:oup:amlawe:v:19:y:2017:i:1:p:96-128 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Adam Bonica & Adam S. Chilton & Jacob Goldin & Kyle Rozema & Maya Sen, 2017. "The Political Ideologies of Law Clerks," American Law and Economics Review, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(1), pages 96-128.
    4. Bonica, Adam & Sen, Maya, 2017. "A Common-Space Scaling of the American Judiciary and Legal Profession," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 25(1), pages 114-121, January.
    5. Raymond Fisman & Pamela Jakiela & Shachar Kariv, 2014. "The Distributional Preferences of Americans," NBER Working Papers 20145, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Bonica, Adam & Sen, Maya, 2015. "The Politics of Selecting the Bench from the Bar: The Legal Profession and Partisan Incentives to Politicize the Judiciary," Working Paper Series rwp15-001, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    7. Eisenberg, Theodore & Wells, Martin T, 2000. "Inbreeding in Law School Hiring: Assessing the Performance of Faculty Hired from Within," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 369-388, January.
    8. Adam Bonica, 2014. "Mapping the Ideological Marketplace," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 58(2), pages 367-386, April.
    9. Adam S. Chilton & Eric A. Posner, 2015. "An Empirical Study of Political Bias in Legal Scholarship," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 44(2), pages 277-314.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Adam Bonica & Adam Chilton & Jacob Goldin & Kyle Rozema & Maya Sen, 2019. "Legal Rasputins? Law Clerk Influence on Voting at the US Supreme Court," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 35(1), pages 1-36.
    2. Bonica, Adam & Chilton, Adam S. & Sen, Maya, 2015. "The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers," Working Paper Series 15-049, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    3. Bonica, Adam & Chilton, Adam S. & Goldin, Jacob & Rozema, Kyle & Sen, Maya, 2016. "Measuring Judicial Ideology Using Law Clerk Hiring," Working Paper Series 16-031, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    4. Spruk, Rok & Kovac, Mitja, 2019. "Replicating and extending Martin-Quinn scores," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    5. Wessel Wijtvliet & Arthur Dyevre, 2021. "Judicial ideology in economic cases: Evidence from the General Court of the European Union," European Union Politics, , vol. 22(1), pages 25-45, March.
    6. Brian D. Feinstein & Jennifer Nou, 2023. "Strategic subdelegation," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 20(4), pages 746-817, December.
    7. Lawson, Cornelia & Geuna, Aldo & Ana Fernández-Zubieta & Toselli, Manuel & Kataishi, Rodrigo, 2015. "International Careers of Researchers in Biomedical Sciences: A Comparison of the US and the UK," Department of Economics and Statistics Cognetti de Martiis. Working Papers 201514, University of Turin.
    8. Adrian Bruhin & Ernst Fehr & Daniel Schunk, 2019. "The many Faces of Human Sociality: Uncovering the Distribution and Stability of Social Preferences," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 17(4), pages 1025-1069.
    9. Hugh-Jones, David & Ooi, Jinnie, 2023. "Where do fairness preferences come from? Norm transmission in a teen friendship network," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    10. Song Jing & Pengxin Xie & Qun Yin & Qingzhao Ma & Celestine Chinedu Ogbu & Xia Guo & Daniel M. J. J. Stanley & Leuta Philatelic Tutaia, 2023. "The effect of academic mobility on research performance: the case of China," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(10), pages 5829-5850, October.
    11. Olga Alipova & Lada Litvinova & Andrey Lovakov & Maria Yudkevich, 2018. "Inbreds And Non-Inbreds Among Russian Academics: Short-Term Similarity And Long-Term Differences In Productivity," HSE Working papers WP BRP 48/EDU/2018, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    12. Laurent Bouton & Julia Cagé & Edgard Dewitte & Vincent Pons, 2021. "Small Campaign Donors," Working Papers hal-03878175, HAL.
    13. Gauriot, Romain & Heger, Stephanie A. & Slonim, Robert, 2020. "Altruism or diminishing marginal utility?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 180(C), pages 24-48.
    14. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/37ufknmfv39tppkbjb4dmidnqe is not listed on IDEAS
    15. Hardardottir, Hjördis & Gerdtham, Ulf-G. & Wengström, Erik, 2019. "What Kind of Inequality Do You Prefer? Evaluating Measures of Income and Health Inequality Using Choice Experiments," Working Papers 2019:7, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 31 May 2019.
    16. Luís Filipe Miranda Grochocki & Andrea Felippe Cabello, 2023. "Research collaboration networks in maturing academic environments," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(4), pages 2535-2556, April.
    17. Pamela Jakiela & Owen Ozier, 2019. "The Impact of Violence on Individual Risk Preferences: Evidence from a Natural Experiment," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 101(3), pages 547-559, July.
    18. Grochocki, Luís Filipe de Miranda & Cabello, Andrea Felippe, 2022. "Academic endogamy or immobility? The impact on scholarly productivity in a developing country," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    19. Dodlova, Marina & Zudenkova, Galina, 2021. "Incumbents’ performance and political extremism," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 201(C).
    20. Uttara Balakrishnan & Johannes Haushofer & Pamela Jakiela, 2020. "How soon is now? Evidence of present bias from convex time budget experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(2), pages 294-321, June.
    21. Cindy Cheng & Joan Barceló & Allison Spencer Hartnett & Robert Kubinec & Luca Messerschmidt, 2020. "COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet v.1.0)," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 4(7), pages 756-768, July.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp17-023. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ksharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.