Law Schools vs. Dissenting Views

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 20, 1999 | by Aimee Howd

Both sides clearly know you can't win -- or lose -- a debate unless you have one. But the Federalist Society seems to be making inroads. By its count, student chapters held 347 nationally sponsored events in the 1997-98 academic year, which drew a total audience of 27,000 -- a 51 percent increase in attendance from the year before. And the nonprofit's funding has grown by 183 percent since 1993.

Is the Federalist Society just swimming against the tide? Northwestern University's Jim Lindgren has tracked the representation of demographic groups at America's top 100 law schools as part of a larger study to be published next year. He has found that while Democrats account for 46.2 percent of the full-time working population, they make up 80.4 percent of law professors. Republicans make up 41 percent of the full-time working population but only 13.2 percent of law professors.

In a comparison of factors from politics and ethnicity to gender and religious affiliation, Lindgren finds that the most underrepresented groups in law-school faculties are Christians and Republicans in general. White female Republicans are the rarest. He points out that, until hiring Alan Ferrel not long ago, Harvard faculty members had not hired a Republican-leaning professor in 26 years. "The question I would give as a thought experiment is this," he says. "Imagine what the law, Congress and the courts would look like if Harvard hadn't hired a Democraticleaning professor in 25 years. The world would be a different place!"

For now, the vast majority of the dozens of law students and professors Insight talked with for this article wouldn't comment for the record on the ideological diversity of their institutions because they didn't want to overgeneralize about problems they didn't know in detail, and they would say less about their own institutions for fear of repercussions. Most libertarian and conservative students interviewed for this article from Yale to the University of San Francisco said they rarely speak up in class and that they always "write liberal" on exams because they fear professors might grade them down for espousing dissenting viewpoints.

Little wonder that conservative students at the top law schools say it can be dangerous to speak out for their values. David Wiener, a student at the University of California-Berkeley law school's Boalt Hall, broke the collective silence last spring when he packaged and published a collection of student essays -- from all political perspectives -- that he solicited in response to campus tensions in the aftermath of a state proposition that made racial preferences in the school's admissions process illegal. He titled the book The Diversity Hoax.

Wiener tells Insight, "The point of the book and the point of my message is that diversity goes much deeper than skin color. We need to respect each individual who makes up those groups. Students are not just part of some racial category, but individuals with beliefs and experiences beyond who their parents are." He wants to send a message to law-school administrators who "refuse to admit that individuals themselves have worth -- worth beyond their racial, gender and sexual affiliations."