A study soon to be published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy demonstrates that conservative and libertarian professors are more professionally productive than their left-liberal faculty colleagues.
The study’s findings also suggest that conservative and libertarian professors suffer discrimination during the faculty hiring process, reports Inside Higher Ed.
The author of the study is James Cleith Phillips of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
Phillips performed an in-depth analysis of the faculties at America’s 16 highest-ranked law schools — how much the professors are publishing and how much their work is being cited.
“Using regression analysis, propensity score matching, propensity score reweighting, nearest neighbor matching, and coarsened exact matching, this paper finds that after taking into account traditional correlates of scholarly ability, conservative and libertarian law professors are cited more and publish more than their peers,” the Boalt Hall professor’s paper abstract explains. “The paper also finds that they tend to have more of the traditional qualifications required of law professors than their peers, with a few exceptions.”
Phillips concludes that, at least at America’s most recognized and fancypants law schools, “conservative and libertarian law professors are not few in number because of a lack of scholarly ability or professional qualifications.”
Viewpoint discrimination in the hiring process is instead the likely culprit, he suggests, despite the several negative educational impacts which result from ideological conformity.
The full title of the study is “Why are There So Few Conservatives and Libertarians in Legal Academia? An Empirical Exploration of Three Hypotheses.”
Phillips does not appear to have a faculty profile at the Cal Berkeley law school website.
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