14 Comments

Not a very useful statistic, at least not to draw any conclusions from. What percentage of people who apply for law professor jobs are liberal. Are liberals more intersted in teaching than conservatives? All interesting questions.

More to the point is the fact that what gets one ahead in the professorial ranks these days is coming up with neat ideas for new ways to use the law to solve society’s problems.

“Well, Bill: your work on using the RICO statute to prosecute restaurants that don’t give patrons half-empty ketchup bottles is really cutting edge. Groundbreaking, really. You’re looking good for tenure.”

Nobody gets ahead in the law schools by saying: “wait, why are we using expensive lawsuits to deal with trivial problems?” And society winds up paying the price for all these neato ideas.

i find it funny because most of those liberals support racial diversity. But the Bakke case often cited for the notion said it was important as a way of fostering intellectual diversity. the idea was that many divergent backgrounds would result in divergent viewpoints. of course the result is a whole rainbow of different colors, genders, sexual orientations, all saying the same thing. which begs the question, can you justify affirmative action based on the desire to bring in different viewpoints, when you put no value on intellectual diversity itself?

I suspect the answer is “no.”

Fairly meaningless statistic. It could be that qualified applicants who are interested in teaching overwhelmingly tend to be liberal in their thinking.

Because, yannow, they’re smarter than you. Just ask ’em.

Don’t forget about the old adage, those who can – do, and those that can’t – teach.

My law school, Brooklyn Law School, has recruited a small handful of Federalist Society-types as professors.

And the business schools hire….

So What?

Two questions for Mr. Vandesic and wybz –

1. Do you accept under-representation of a given group in other contexts as the result of group preferences rather than bias?

2. Do you acknowledge that the overwhelming over-representation of liberals on law school faculties is grounds for skepticism when the opinion of law professors is invoked in support of a given proposition?

This isn’t terribly surprising. Academic institutions in general tend to lean a little to the left, so it makes sense that they hire that way.

wybz,

If they don’t have these tendencies when they start their education to become teachers, they do when they finish, because, it is ingrained in them during their education.

Jackie, of course there are a variety of actions besides bias that can impact a statistical distribution. The issue here is that the data and data analysis is insufficient to draw a conclusion in this example. As to your second question, before you can be skeptical, you need more data. Unfortunately the lack of data doesn’t usually people who have already made up their mind about an issue (all too common these days).

Jerry

So you would remain similary agnostic regarding, e.g., underrepresentation of females in math and science – that is, you would acknowledge that it may be the result of factors other than bias?

Regarding the second point – A demonstrably biased group gives an opinion regarding a matter on which it biased and that opinion is cited because of the supposed authoritativeness of the biased group – but we aren’t justified in being skeptical of the opinion and whether we should defer to the “authoritative” group unless we “have more data?” Sorry – that’s just not sensible.