Alan Jacobs

Elite law faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. Jim Lindgren has proven the point empirically. I will just add my impressions from Georgetown Law School to reinforce the point. We are a faculty of 120, and, to my knowledge, the number of professors who are openly conservative, or libertarian, or Republican or, in any sense, to the right of the American center, is three — three out of 120. There are more conservatives on the nine-member United States Supreme Court than there are on this 120-member faculty. Moreover, the ideological median of the other 117 seems to lie not just left of center, but closer to the left edge of the Democratic Party. Many are further left than that.

But at least there are three. And the good news is that this number has tripled in the last decade. The bad news, though, is that, at Georgetown, the consensus seems to be that three is plenty — and perhaps even one or two too many.