Having participated in one session of the Federalist Society’s
event on intellectual diversity in law schools (video here), I’ve been mulling over what I
heard. (I was at only the opening session, nominally on whether there was a
problem, though of course the premise of the rest of the event was that there
was.) Here’s what I took away from it.
Remarkably, the other participants appear to believe that
the market for legal education doesn’t work, and that students have to be
paternalistically protected against the bad consequences of their choices. My
comments were directed to the existence of a market across institutions. The
idea is that institutions offer bundles of attributes to consumers
(applicants), and each consumer chooses the bundle that, from her point of
view, maximizes the achievement of her preferences as she understands them at
the moment of choice. I used Pepperdine as my primary example, because it’s a
school with a strong public law faculty that leans more conservative than other
institutions (but I could have offered others – San Diego and St. Thomas in St.
Paul, for example). So, consider a conservative student applying to Harvard and
Pepperdine. If she gets in to Harvard, she’s certainly going to get into
Pepperdine, and the LSAT and GPA numbers suggest pretty strongly that she’ll do
better at Pepperdine than at Harvard. So, her choice is between (a) a
liberal-leaning school where she’ll probably do all right but might not be at
the top of the class, and the job opportunities associated with having a
Harvard degree and (b) a conservative-ish law school where she’ll probably do
quite well, with the job opportunities available to a student at the top of
Pepperdine’s class. It’s not at all clear to me that, given across-institution
diversity, there’s a problem with the market in legal education. So, maybe the complaint isn't that there's not enough across-institution diversity. But, nothing that I heard addressed that question.
Another version of the analysis is that Harvard’s developed
a product that sells quite well in the market. It's not clear that the (mere) fact that there
are some consumers who would like to have available to them a product that has
all the attributes of Harvard’s bundle other than its political leaning ought
to be a matter of concern to Harvard or, indeed, anyone other than the consumer
who would like to see a wider array of products on offer. (And, if anyone
starts thinking about the analysis of reputation and alumni networks that might
be associated with Sweatt v. Painter,
I think the response is that Harvard is willing to sell its product to anyone
without regard to her values.)
Yet a third version was embodied in my response to Steve
Calabresi, who said that the real problem with a lack of intellectual diversity
was that liberal students didn’t find their views challenged in the classroom
by conservative professors. Both Jack Goldsmith and I had noted that we don’t
really know the extent to which reported general political affiliations
translate into bias in the classroom, but put that aside. Calabresi’s comment
suggests that conservatives benefit from the asserted liberal bias in the
classroom because they will find their views challenged (and so shouldn’t
really complain about it) – and that the group that should be sponsoring the
event is the American Constitution Society. The weirdness of that proposition
suggests that the argument’s goine off the rails somewhere. I think it does
when people worry about within-institution diversity without thinking about the
implications of across-institution diversity.
This post is already too long, so I’ll save additional comments
for one to follow soon.