Law Schools

Does The LSAT Have A Liberal Bias?

Conservatives have something new to bitch and moan about.

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Hard Test 2In last Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof offered “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance.” The piece wasn’t so much “wrong-headed” as it required the sort of back-breaking contortion to create a hot take for the typical, effete legacy admit who reads the New York Times op-ed for its relatively superficial analysis and consistent millennial hate.

Off the top, Kristof says:

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

Ah. Judging people based on conditions they’re born with is equivalent to judging people on conditions they affirmatively choose to believe. Perhaps all the conservative vitriol over liberal “moral relativism” is deserved after all because this is one hell of a false equivalency.

But alas, the real reason we’re looking at Kristof’s piece is this passage:

This bias on campuses creates liberal privilege. A friend is studying for the Law School Admission Test, and the test preparation company she is using offers test-takers a tip: Reading comprehension questions will typically have a liberal slant and a liberal answer.

Maybe the real beef with Arizona is that allowing students to take the GRE will disrupt the long-term leftist propaganda regime that LSAC’s quietly perpetrated over the last 70 years.

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But is the test really biased? Let’s examine a practice question straight off LSAC’s website:

The painter Roy Lichtenstein helped to define pop art—the movement that incorporated commonplace objects and commercial-art techniques into paintings—by paraphrasing the style of comic books in his work. His merger of a popular genre with the forms and intentions of fine art generated a complex result: while poking fun at the pretensions of the art world, Lichtenstein’s work also managed to convey a seriousness of theme that enabled it to transcend mere parody.

That Lichtenstein’s images were fine art was at first difficult to see, because, with their word balloons and highly stylized figures, they looked like nothing more than the comic book panels from which they were copied. Standard art history holds that pop art emerged as an impersonal alternative to the histrionics of abstract expressionism, a movement in which painters conveyed their private attitudes and emotions using nonrepresentational techniques. The truth is that by the time pop art first appeared in the early 1960s, abstract expressionism had already lost much of its force. Pop art painters weren’t quarreling with the powerful early abstract expressionist work of the late 1940s but with a second generation of abstract expressionists whose work seemed airy, high-minded, and overly lyrical. Pop art paintings were full of simple black lines and large areas of primary color. Lichtenstein’s work was part of a general rebellion against the fading emotional power of abstract expressionism, rather than an aloof attempt to ignore it.

But if rebellion against previous art by means of the careful imitation of a popular genre were all that characterized Lichtenstein’s work, it would possess only the reflective power that parodies have in relation to their subjects. Beneath its cartoonish methods, his work displayed an impulse toward realism, an urge to say that what was missing from contemporary painting was the depiction of contemporary life. The stilted romances and war stories portrayed in the comic books on which he based his canvases, the stylized automobiles, hot dogs, and table lamps that appeared in his pictures, were reflections of the culture Lichtenstein inhabited. But, in contrast to some pop art, Lichtenstein’s work exuded not a jaded cynicism about consumer culture, but a kind of deliberate naivete, intended as a response to the excess of sophistication he observed not only in the later abstract expressionists but in some other pop artists. With the comics—typically the domain of youth and innocence—as his reference point, a nostalgia fills his paintings that gives them, for all their surface bravado, an inner sweetness. His persistent use of comic-art conventions demonstrates a faith in reconciliation, not only between cartoons and fine art, but between parody and true feeling.

Which one of the following best captures the author’s attitude toward Lichtenstein’s work?
(a) enthusiasm for its more rebellious aspects
(b) respect for its successful parody of youth and innocence
(c) pleasure in its blatant rejection of abstract expressionism
(d) admiration for its subtle critique of contemporary culture
(e) appreciation for its ability to incorporate both realism and naivete

The guy painted fighter jets blowing up commies! What could possibly offend conservative sensibilities here?

Here’s another:

In economics, the term “speculative bubble” refers to a large upward move in an asset’s price driven not by the asset’s fundamentals—that is, by the earnings derivable from the asset—but rather by mere speculation that someone else will be willing to pay a higher price for it. The price increase is then followed by a dramatic decline in price, due to a loss in confidence that the price will continue to rise, and the “bubble” is said to have burst. According to Charles Mackay’s classic nineteenth-century account, the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip market provides an example of a speculative bubble. But the economist Peter Garber challenges Mackay’s view, arguing that there is no evidence that the Dutch tulip market really involved a speculative bubble.

By the seventeenth century, the Netherlands had become a center of cultivation and development of new tulip varieties, and a market had developed in which rare varieties of bulbs sold at high prices. For example, a Semper Augustus bulb sold in 1625 for an amount of gold worth about U.S. $11,000 in 1999. Common bulb varieties, on the other hand, sold for very low prices. According to Mackay, by 1636 rapid price rises attracted speculators, and prices of many varieties surged upward from November 1636 through January 1637. Mackay further states that in February 1637 prices suddenly collapsed; bulbs could not be sold at 10 percent of their peak values. By 1739, the prices of all the most prized kinds of bulbs had fallen to no more than one two-hundredth of 1 percent of Semper Augustus’s peak price.

Garber acknowledges that bulb prices increased dramatically from 1636 to 1637 and eventually reached very low levels. But he argues that this episode should not be described as a speculative bubble, for the increase and eventual decline in bulb prices can be explained in terms of the fundamentals. Garber argues that a standard pricing pattern occurs for new varieties of flowers. When a particularly prized variety is developed, its original bulb sells for a high price. Thus, the dramatic rise in the price of some original tulip bulbs could have resulted as tulips in general, and certain varieties in particular, became fashionable. However, as the prized bulbs become more readily available through reproduction from the original bulb, their price falls rapidly; after less than 30 years, bulbs sell at reproduction cost. But this does not mean that the high prices of original bulbs are irrational, for earnings derivable from the millions of bulbs descendent from the original bulbs can be very high, even if each individual descendent bulb commands a very low price. Given that an original bulb can generate a reasonable return on investment even if the price of descendent bulbs decreases dramatically, a rapid rise and eventual fall of tulip bulb prices need not indicate a speculative bubble.

Given Garber’s account of the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip market, which one of the following is most analogous to someone who bought a tulip bulb of a certain variety in that market at a very high price, only to sell a bulb of that variety at a much lower price?

(a) someone who, after learning that many others had withdrawn their applications for a particular job, applied for the job in the belief that there would be less competition for it
(b) an art dealer who, after paying a very high price for a new painting, sells it at a very low price because it is now considered to be an inferior work
(c) someone who, after buying a box of rare motorcycle parts at a very high price, is forced to sell them at a much lower price because of the sudden availability of cheap substitute parts
(d) a publisher who pays an extremely high price for a new novel only to sell copies at a price affordable to nearly everyone
(e) an airline that, after selling most of the tickets for seats on a plane at a very high price, must sell the remaining tickets at a very low price

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Has economics really become verboten for conservative students? I get that the whole trickle-down thing didn’t work out for y’all, but basic supply and demand can’t be off limits now. On the other hand the correct answer — d, obviously — does have a business owner selling a product “affordable to nearly everyone.” F**king Bernie Bro right there!

Ultimately, Kristof’s claim here is “nameless friend has unknown instructor from unknown company who makes provocative statement.” Finally Judith Miller has some company in the “New York Times uses anonymous source to make clearly untrue conservative claim” camp.

Reading comprehension can be hard for some people. That’s why we made all those TTTs. To paraphrase Justice Scalia:

[I]t does not benefit [conservatives] to — to get them into the [T14 programs] where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.

Or just quit whining and study for the test.

A Confession of Liberal Intolerance [New York Times]

Earlier: Arizona Law Picked A Fight With A Big Dog

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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