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Droddy, J D; Peters, C S --- "The Effects of Law School on Political Attitudes: Some Evidence from the Class of 2000" [2004] LegEdDig 9; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 13

The Effects of Law School on Political Attitudes: Some Evidence from the Class of 2000

J D Droddy & C S Peters

[2004] LegEdDig 9; (2004) 12(3) Legal Education Digest 13

53 J Legal Educ 1, 2003, pp 33–47

In his dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision in Romer v. Evans, Justice Scalia claims that majority opinion is based less upon the Constitution than upon the ‘views and values of the lawyer class’. The case involved a Colorado voter initiative that prohibited state or municipal legislation that would protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation. According to Scalia, the failure of the Court to respect the results of the initiative reveals the majority’s ‘law school view of what prejudices must be stamped out’ and its disdain for ‘the more plebeian attitudes’ of the rest of society.

This article continues that line of research, investigating the effects of law school on students’ political attitudes. The authors demonstrate that the political and social attitudes of students entering law school do not differ dramatically from those of other college graduates and that little attitudinal change takes place while they are in law school. They conclude that, to the extent that law school may account for the presence of a ‘lawyer class’ in society, it is mostly due to self-selection or to the admissions process, rather than to socialisation or indoctrination.

While some studies have directly measured change of political attitudes, many of them are concerned with broader professional attitudes that nonetheless have an ideological dimension. In fact, there is considerable debate about how lawyers’ attitudes affect their perceptions of their professional roles, which makes investigation of law school’s effects on their attitudes even more important.

Beginning in the late twentieth century, critical theorists having targeted the profession and the educational system that produces its members. In their view, law school serves primarily to reinforce existing social and economic structures, producing a profession that caters largely to the needs of economic elites. As a consequence of this debate over lawyers’ attitudes toward their role in society, many empirical investigations of law school’s socialising effects limit themselves to examining the development of students’ professional values and attitudes. Numerous studies find that many students enter law school eager to serve the public interest, but that their goals change markedly during law school.

However, often these studies have eschewed direct tests of ideological leanings or political attitudes, preferring to examine the effect of law school on ideologically related attitudes, such as the role of the legal system. When empirical studies have found systematic changes in ideology or political attitudes among a law school population, they have found slight movement in the conservative direction. But few of these studies use any baseline that will allow them to compare law students’ attitudes to those of other elite groups. Accordingly, we cannot rule out the possibility that most of the difference between lawyers and non-lawyers results from self-selection or from the law school admission process, rather than from the law school experience itself. And even if some attitudinal change does occur during law school, students may simply be reflecting broader changes in public opinion during the same period.

The authors measured the political attitudes of a panel of students from 28 law schools at the beginning of their first year, and again at the end of their third year. They solicited law schools to participate in the study with a letter to the deans of all ABA-accredited law schools and followed this up with requests for participation on the LAWCOURTS list, an electronic mailing list popular among both law and political science teachers. At most of those schools, participants were selected randomly. The initial survey was administered to 545 law students early in their first semester in law school. It collected demographic data, as well as data measuring the respondents’ attitudes toward a variety of political, social and legal issues.

Editor’s note: The detailed findings from this study are set out in a number of tables with commentary from the authors, which space does not enable us to digest fully.

As a group, graduating law students were neither more liberal nor more conservative than when they entered law school. Students at more prestigious law schools changed their students in ways similar to those at other schools, with two exceptions. Students in prestigious schools grew more liberal on environment regulations, while students at other schools grew more conservative. And while students at all schools grew more favourable toward affirmative action for blacks, those at prestigious schools grew significantly more supportive than did others.

Our main findings can be summarised as follows. (1) The average law student is moderate, though she has liberal attitudes about many social issues. Overall, entering law students are, on average, slightly more liberal than their college-educated peers. (2) Female law students are significantly more liberal than their male counterparts and are more liberal than the broader population of female college graduates. (3) After three years of law school, students describe their own views as more liberal than they did when they entered, and a few of their attitudes do, in fact, move in that direction. Our respondents become slightly more supportive of gay rights, of affirmative action programs for women, and of government spending to help the poor. But on defence spending they moved strongly in the conservative direction. (4) There are few systematic differences in level or direction of attitudinal change between the sexes or between students from higher and lower prestige schools.

These results provide no overwhelming support for theories that law school contributes to major attitudinal changes among students. Although there was evidence of a change of a few political attitudes, they were not all in the same direction, undermining theories that law school indoctrinates its students with ideological messages.

The results suggest that law students have much in common with the larger population of college graduates when they begin their legal education and that they do not change their attitudes dramatically while in school. To the extent that lawyers’ attitudes differ from those of their college-educated peers, these differences may be attributed to self-selection or to the LSAT and the admission process. This is hardly the picture of legal education that critics have painted over the years but, according to the findings from the study, it is an empirically accurate one.


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