A law school with a twist: at George Mason University, the Left doesn't reign, believe it or not

National Review, March 13, 2006 by John J. Miller

THIS is a nerve-wracking time of year for law-school deans, as they await the results of what amounts to the Bowl Championship Series for their profession: On March 31, U.S. News' & World Report will release its rankings of the top 100 law schools in the country. Most of the deans insist that these assessments are "inherently flawed" and "unreliable'--and virtually all of them will sign an open letter to law-school applicants that says so.

But Daniel Polsby, the dean of the George Mason University School of Law, is different. His name will not appear on the forthcoming annual missive, and he's actually looking forward to the U.S. News survey. "We hope to move up a few places this year," he says. That would certainly be in keeping with a decade-long trend: Mason vaulted from 71st place in 1995 to 41st in 2005--an impressive achievement given that these rankings tend to remain static from year to year. Even more remarkable is that this fast-rising star in the law-school firmament possesses a faculty of professors who lean decidedly to the right.

This fact alone makes the GMU law school unique. As with just about every other precinct of higher education, liberals dominate law schools. A study in The Georgetown Law Journal last fall found that among professors at leading law schools who made political campaign contributions of at least $200, 81 percent of them gave almost exclusively to Democrats. Only 15 percent preferred Republicans. This preference was especially lopsided at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford--the top three law schools in the most recent U.S. News survey--where donations to Democrats topped 90 percent.

GMU wasn't included in the survey, but its figures wouldn't have looked the same. For one thing, the faculty includes an unusually high number of Republicans. Several professors have moved in and out of the Bush administration, such as Timothy J. Muris, who was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, and William H. Lash III, who was an assistant secretary at the Commerce Department. Those who aren't Republicans are often Libertarians. "I knew things were different here when I saw a particular bumper sticker in the parking lot," says Ronald Rotunda, a professor who arrived from the University of Illinois in 2002. "It said: 'There's no government like no government.'" To be sure, there are Democrats on the faculty, including the guy who runs the school's legal-aid clinic. But rather than sue police departments and defend death-row inmates--the all-too-typical activities of groups like this--Joseph Zengerle's students provide help to members of the military and their families. And if that weren't enough, Mason is the only law school in America that has a chair endowed by the National Rifle Association (or, to be specific, an NRA foundation); Nelson Lund is the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and the Second Amendment. It is perhaps not too farfetched to think that GMU's law school will become to the early 21st century what the University of Chicago Law School was to the latter half of the 20th--a high-caliber bastion of conservative (or at least classic-liberal) legal thinking.

A TRANSFORMATIONAL DEAN

The International School of Law was founded by Evangelicals in a church basement in 1972; seven years later, a growing George Mason University absorbed and secularized it. The school was a run-of-the-mill institution until 1986, when Henry Manne arrived on its campus in Arlington, Va. (The law school was then in a converted department-store building.) Manne was already a respected scholar in the "law and economics" movement, which says laws should be evaluated not only for their ability to dispense justice but also for their economic impact. Its founding fathers include Gary Becker and Ronald Coase--both winners of the Nobel prize for economics--as well as Richard Posner, who is now a prominent federal judge. The law-and-economics scholars were initially associated with the University of Chicago, which is where Manne gained his first exposure to this philosophy as a law student. Since the 1960s and 1970s, however, the movement's influence has broadened to the point where every good law school has at least a handful of economic specialists on the faculty.

It would be wrong to say that law and economics is an exclusively conservative or libertarian field. Two years ago one of its pioneers, federal judge Guido Calabresi (a former dean of Yale Law School), compared the election of George W. Bush to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler (he later apologized). Nonetheless, law and economics has allowed many conservative professors to find a safe harbor within legal academia. "Economics is understood to be an objective discipline, particularly as compared to other approaches," says James Piereson, former executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, which spent millions of dollars on law-and-economics programs. "To the extent that economic analysis points in the direction of individual choice and the efficiency of markets, it is a powerful tool for those who wish to restrain the growth of government."