What Do Law Professor Campaign Contributions Say About Their Politics?

LawProfBlawg (Anonymous Professor, Top 100 Law School), What Do My Campaign Contributions Say About My Politics?:

Dean Paul Caron posted on TaxProfBlog some findings from professor Derek Muller about law school faculty campaign donations from 2017 to early 2023.

The results are stunning. According to Muller, he “identified 3,148 law faculty who contributed only to Democrats in this 5+ year span — 95.9% of the data set of those identified as contributing to either Democrats or Republicans in this period. Another 88 (2.7%) contributed only to Republicans. And 48 others contributed to both Democrats and Republicans.” ...

In a time in which there is a quest to show universities in general and law schools in particular as woke bastions of liberals and commies, I know this will be used to scream to the heavens about how liberal the legal academy is, and perhaps be used as further attacks on tenure, curriculum, and funding of higher education.

But I’m not sure what I’m seeing is evidence of a bastion of liberals and commies. ...

I don’t have a lot of answers. Just a lot of questions. Nonetheless, I greatly appreciate Muller’s contribution to the discussion.

Despite these questions, I’m likely to see data such as this used as a reason for increasing “ideological diversity” in faculty (the only DEI that apparently is still legal in some states). I am not claiming that is Muller’s purpose. Regardless, I’m for more intellectual diversity — by breaking up the law professor supply cartel from just a few schools. I wonder what that would do — not only to the diversity of faculty but to support for higher education more broadly. Oddly, I don’t see a lot of vocal support for this idea from the folks who claim to be seeking intellectual diversity.

Ilya Somin (George Mason; Google Scholar), Study Finds Law Professor Contributions to Political Campaigns Skew Overwhelmingly Democratic:

[I]t would be good if there were more ideological diversity in legal academia. Studies indicate that ideological diversity can improve the quality of discourse and scholarship. If all or most scholars in a given field have similar views, that increases the likelihood that some key issues and arguments will be ignored or at least relatively neglected.

As I have emphasized before (e.g. here and here), the desirability of greater ideological diversity doesn't mean schools should adopt affirmative action for non-left-wing legal academics, or that we should strive for a legal academy that "looks like America" in terms of the distribution of partisanship and ideology. But much can be achieved simply ending or significantly reducing ideological discrimination in faculty hiring.

As with racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination, ideological discrimination not only reduces diversity, but also reduces the quality of scholarship and teaching. Lower-quality candidates with the preferred views get hired in preference to better-qualified dissenters. Thus, we can potentially increase diversity and quality at the same time.

Even if discrimination ended completely, we would likely still have a disproportionate number of left-wing and Democratic lawprofs relative to the proportions of these groups in the general population. Among other things, highly educated people—especially in the Trump era—tend to skew left, or at least against the conservative right. But ending discrimination would nonetheless make legal academia more ideologically diverse than it is now.