Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Research Paper Series

Publication Date

2025

Publication Title

Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics

Abstract

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 as professors have become more liberal over time, their students have become even more liberal. The result is that ideological concordance has increased over time and that by 2010 the average law student actually attended a law school with more professors to their ideological right than to their ideological left. However, the overall trends mask considerable differences in concordance for liberal and conservative students. While the average liberal student attended a law school with roughly equal shares of professors to their ideological right and left, the average conservative student attended a law school where 90 percent of their professors were more liberal than them.

Number

1040

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