Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Publication Date

2024

Publication Title

Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics

Abstract

The largely liberal composition of American university faculties is frequently lamented in academic discourse and public debate, largely out of concern that professors “brainwash” younger generations with left-leaning principles. However, these complaints often fail to acknowledge that university students are also overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus possible that university professors are more liberal than the American public but more conservative than their students. In this article, we develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of students and professors in American law schools over more than a twenty-year period to estimate the degree of ideological concordance in the legal academy. We find that although professors have become more liberal over time, they have also become more conservative than their students.

Number

1040

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