Harvard Law School will hold a conference today that asks the question: Are law school faculties too liberal?
Joey Alicea, the president of the Harvard branch of the conservative-libertarian Federalist Society, and the organizer of the conference, told USA Today, “We have very few conservatives on the faculty here at Harvard Law School, and until that changes, we’re going to have a real lack of intellectual diversity here. Students are not well served by having such an intellectually monolithic faculty.”
One law professor at Northwestern University School of Law, John McGinnis, said that the situation has not improved since a study he conducted in 2005. The study discovered that close to 80 percent of politically active professors at top law schools contribute to Democrats.
“It’s overwhelmingly one way still,” he says. “Things are maybe somewhat better, but it’s not dramatically changed. In some sense, I think it’s worse for liberals, who don’t have their ideas challenged.”
Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, and the two senior justices, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, all graduated from Harvard Law School. Justice Elena Kagan was the dean of the school. Justice Stephen Breyer also graduated from Harvard Law School. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg studied at the school for two years prior to graduating from Columbia.