Pro Bono Supreme Court Amicus Briefs Provide Additional Evidence That BigLaw Skews Liberal

David Lat (Bloomberg Law), Big Law Skews Liberal in Amicus Briefs, New Study Finds:

Does Big Law lean liberal?

Everyone has opinions and anecdotes, but there’s actually empirical research on this question. A 2015 paper by experts from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago [The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers] analyzed a vast dataset of individual attorneys’ federal campaign contributions and found that lawyers overall are “liberal-leaning.” And they found that lawyers at the 100 largest firms, aka Big Law, are more liberal as a group than lawyers who work at smaller firms.

In a new paper published today in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy [Ideological Leanings in Likely Pro Bono BigLaw Amicus Briefs in the United States Supreme Court], University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller takes a new and interesting approach to identifying the ideological leanings of large law firms. He analyzed all the US Supreme Court amicus briefs filed by Am Law 100 firms on behalf of what he deemed “likely pro bono” clients, over a four-year period—from the 2018-2019 term through the 2021-2022 term—to see whether the briefs took a liberal or conservative position. ...

Based on his review of pro bono amicus briefs, Muller learned that of the 851 briefs in total, 64% supported the liberal position, 31% supported the conservative position, and 5% supported neither side.

Muller then divided the cases up into three cohorts based on significance or salience. ... [I]n these hot-button cases, the liberal skew is indisputably overwhelming: 95% of the Big Law briefs supported the liberal position, and only 5% supported the conservative position. ...

Most large law firms lean blue; some firms are more red. But at the end of the day, Big Law’s favorite color is green.