Top Law Schools

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the ... ools/#ss-3

They use basically the same methodology as DW-Nominate to score the political persuasions of supreme court justices and then see where the clerks from each school go.

Predictably, Berkeley and NYU are the most liberal; UVA the most conservative.

This is really really cool.

cotiger wrote:http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the ... ools/#ss-3

They use basically the same methodology as DW-Nominate to score the political persuasions of supreme court justices and then see where the clerks from each school go.

Predictably, Berkeley and NYU are the most liberal; UVA the most conservative.

Great

This will hold soo much weight in my decision....

So do H and Y have bimodal curves because they send so many clerks out total, whereas only the conservatives look at Penn/UVA grads? Other interpretations?

this is basically what I would have expected, with my only surprise being stanford.

nothingtosee wrote:So do H and Y have bimodal curves because they send so many clerks out total, whereas only the conservatives look at Penn/UVA grads? Other interpretations?

Right, this. This data tells us much more about which schools the respective wings of the court will consider hiring from than the politics of the schools themselves.

Egregious Duke/Cornell trolling.

Carter1901 wrote:Egregious Duke/Cornell trolling.

This is cool data. Thanks for the post, OP.

jbagelboy wrote:this is basically what I would have expected, with my only surprise being stanford.

Rehnquist must just have been a self-loving sucker for his alam mater.

Carter1901 wrote:Egregious Duke/Cornell trolling.

More like UT/Georgetown trolling, unless Duke and Cornell can lay claim to a significant number of the clerks with no law schools listed on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_la ... ted_States

jbagelboy wrote:this is basically what I would have expected, with my only surprise being stanford.

Stanford Law has a fairly large conglomerate of alumni in Texas so it's actually not too surprising to me that a high number of their graduates are conservatives. Not that every lawyer in Texas that went to Stanford is conservative but one would think that the majority are

Plus Boalt likely takes most of the hard-leaning lefties

SLS is super liberal; I'd guess ACS/allied groups outnumbers Fed Soc significantly. I think sample size is too small (and SLS too small/too young) to really say this reflects how liberal/conservative the school is.