The (Mostly Liberal) Political Ideologies Of American Lawyers, Law Schools, And Firms

Some findings from the most extensive analysis of the politics of U.S. lawyers ever conducted

With a mere fifteen sober and dignified months left in this presidential election cycle, a new study appears on the political predilections of America’s lawyers. This is significant: while “Rule of Law” is our national aspiration, “rule by lawyers” is what we know. For example, both a majority of current Senators and all U.S. presidents are, or were, lawyers. Of course, the political influence of lawyers is not limited to elected officials; lawyers contribute political donations at a rate about ten times higher than the general U.S. population.

Comes now The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers, a data-rich study by professors from Stanford, Chicago, and Harvard which maps out the links between political ideology and the American legal profession. It’s the most extensive analysis of the politics of U.S. lawyers ever conducted. Download the paper here.

TL;DR Version:

Data on ideological leanings is from the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME). The DIME data leverages campaign contributions to assess an individual’s ideological leaning. Lawyer info is from the Martindale-Hubbell. (We refer you to the paper itself for a full account of the methodology.)

This analysis takes contributions data and rescales them according to an ideological scoring system (“CFscores” ) created by Adam Bonica of Stanford, one of the paper’s authors. CFscores range from -2 (the liberal extreme) to 2 (the conservative counterpart). For some context, Hilary Clinton has a score of -1.16, while her husband comes in at -0.68.

Here are 10 notable findings from the study:

  • The modal CFscore for American lawyers is -0.52 (i.e., tilting liberal but closer to Bill than Hilary)
  • There are relatively few “centrist” lawyers: more have an ideology closer to Bernie Sanders or Paul Ryan than do near Olympia Snowe on the spectrum
  • Of the top 25 largest U.S. legal markets, only three have more conservative lawyers than liberal lawyers: Atlanta, Dallas, and Phoenix
  • Lawyers as a group are more conservative than technology workers, journalists, and academics, but more liberal than bankers, accountants and MDs
  • Law professors overlap ideologically with no other category of lawyer except public defenders and entertainment lawyers, who are the only types nearly as liberal
  • While they do not lean as far to the left as public defenders, prosecutors are actually more liberal than lawyers overall
  • Alumni from all the T14 law schools lean to the left, with Berkeley having the most liberal graduates of all the elite law schools
  • Alumni from schools ranked 100 or higher by U.S. News, are the most conservative. The two most conservative law schools are both located in Alabama (Cumberland School of Law and the University of Alabama)
  • While entertainment law is the most liberal law firm practice, the most conservative lawyers are in the oil and gas group
  • All of the “V20” Biglaw firms have a liberal mean CFscore. The most liberal: Quinn Emanuel. The most conservative V20 firm is Jones Day, with a (still slightly liberal) CFscore of -0.213

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Here are the CFscores for the top 20 Vault firms (Recall that negative values further away from zero indicate a more liberal ideology, while positive values further away from zero indicate a more conservative ideology):

Overall, while this study appears to largely confirm what we all mostly suspected or assumed about the political leanings of the profession, there are certainly some surprises. Read the whole thing for examinations of ideological distributions by education, geographic market, categories of firm, and more. Of course, let us know what you think in comments.

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