Study on political ideology of law firms Forum

[crgoss]

Study at http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/msen/f ... logies.pdf

Here is a law 360 write-up on the article. Discuss.

Law360, New York (August 31, 2015, 6:57 PM ET) -- A new study on the ideology of American lawyers concludes that attorneys tend to lean left, especially those at the nation’s 25 largest law firms, and found that WilmerHale clinches the title of most-liberal among the nation’s largest law firms, followed by Ropes & Gray LLP and Perkins Coie LLP.

The finding that American lawyers lean to the left of the ideological spectrum comes from a paper slated to be published in the forthcoming edition of Harvard Law School’s Journal of Legal Analysis. The paper's authors reviewed federal campaign contribution statistics and applied the data to lawyers listed in the Martindale Hubbell Legal Directory. The authors say their review is the most extensive analysis of the political ideology of American lawyers ever conducted.

“In total, lawyers control two-thirds of the three branches of the federal government. Understanding how this population as a whole behaves is not only descriptively interesting, but also illuminating in terms of understanding the influence wielded by this very significant group,” the authors said.

On a scale where zero is entirely centrist, the mean score among the attorney population is -0.31, compared with -0.05 for the entire population of political donors, the study found.

“This places the average American lawyer’s ideology close to the ideology of Bill Clinton,” the authors of the paper “The Political Ideologies of American Lawyers” wrote.

The authors are Adam Bonica of the Stanford University Department of Political Science, Adam S. Chilton of the University of Chicago Law School and Maya Sen of Harvard University’s Harvard Kennedy School.

The study not only identified the political leanings of lawyers themselves, but of law firms as well. It found that more liberal-leaning attorneys work at one of the 25 largest law firms in the U.S.

The study’s authors concluded that WilmerHale is the most left-leaning law firm among the 20 largest firms in the country, Ropes & Gray is the second most liberal, Perkins Coie is third, DLA Piper is fourth, followed by Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom, sidley austin llp, Hogan Lovells, K&L Gates LLP, Latham & Watkins LLP and littler mendelson pc.

They said attorneys who work in small practices or have solo-practices typically lean to the left, but also have a number of attorneys with center-right scores and are, in general, more centrist than lawyers at BigLaw firms.

When it comes to the political ideology of lawyers based on where they went to school, the 14 most prestigious law schools, according to the 2015 U.S. News and World Report rankings, have distributions that lean to the left. The University of California, Berkeley tops the list with the most liberal-leaning alumni of all the elite law schools.

All of the top six law schools — Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Columbia Law School, University of Chicago Law School and New York University School of Law — have a relatively small number of graduates with conservative scores, according to the study. But, both the University of Virginia School of Law and Duke University School of Law have a sizable number of conservative alumni.

There were variations in political ideology based on practice area as well.

While most practice areas skewed at least a little bit liberal, 17 of 48 practice areas examined in the study were found to be more conservative, in a statistically significant way, with oil and gas topping the list.

Additionally, 16 practice areas are associated with significantly more liberal scores, entertainment law chief among them.

The study's authors explained that although American lawyers lean to the left, there is a bimodality to the distribution of lawyers' ideologies.

While there is a spike of occurrence located around the center-left, there is also a second, smaller peak in the center-right, the paper said.

“In other words, the ideology of American lawyers peaks around Bill Clinton on the left and around Mitt Romney on the right,” it said.

[CanadianWolf]

Not sure about lawyers & law firms political beliefs other than that they oppose tort reform. Since Republicans favor tort reform & Democrats oppose tort reform, trial attorneys tend to donate to Democrats and/or the Democratic Party.

[Anonymous User]

It's not just tort reform, obviously, as the largest firms do very little or no plaintiff-side work, especially in the torts field. Generally all post-grad degree fields lean Democratic to one degree or another these days (despite history otherwise--doctors are much more favorable to the Democrats today than they were 30 years ago, e.g.), so this is hardly a surprise.

But I would say that big law firms on average split about 75-25 Democratic-Republican in the big cities, though you'll find some offices that vary from that model. (Firms like Perkins Coie, which is essentially the Democratic Party's law firm, will obviously be even more overwhelmingly Democratic, while a few offices in DC that work closely with the Republican Party, such as Gibson Dunn, will be closer to split evenly or lean Republican in that office, though not necessarily firmwide.)