Thanks to Alan Childress at the Legal Profession Blog for the tip on this remarkable site at the Huffington Post, where you can learn who donates to political candidates, how much they donate, where the donors live, where the donors work, etc.
I understand why we need to know this sort of information, but I did feel kind of creepy when I saw the names, addresses, and political donations of my colleagues in legal academia by using simple search criteria. In case you're interested in the bottom line, the data for legal academics is similar to the results of other studies: law professors give a lot more money to Democrats than to Republicans. (In my unscientific analysis at the Huffington site, donations from law professors favor the Democrats by a 10-1 margin.)
Back in 2005, Brian Leiter argued that this kind of information is relatively meaningless. In contrast, others, such as Professor Peter Schuck, suggested that political party affiliations probably do impact the way in which law professors teach their courses. He argued that "it seems likely that professors' decidedly liberal ideology has a significant influence on what their students think. After all, spending two to four hours a week for over three months listening to an articulate, knowledgeable, skilled rhetorician expound on the law must have some persuasive effect."
Personally, I am somewhat skeptical that our party affiliations have a strong impact on what students learn or how we teach most classes. For example, I have trouble believing that Democrats teach legal ethics in a meaningfully different way than Republicans or that students end up with different views about legal ethics as a result of their professors' party affiliations.
One of my colleagues suggests (and I agree) that other factors probably have a greater impact on how we teach our courses. For example, law professors have more experience at elite law firms than most lawyers, which means that many (most?) law professors have spent thousands of hours representing the legal interests of business entities. This experience is much more likely to influence how we understand and teach about the law than party affiliation.
To be specific, I'd imagine that someone with large law firm experience would teach legal ethics in a different way (e.g., focusing on issues that impact law firm lawyers and their business clients) than someone who had spent her career as a prosecutor or a legal aid lawyer. This tendency is likely to affect some students, including their perceptions of what the typical lawyer does for a living and what kinds of careers are held in high esteem.
In short, it seems to me that party affiliation (as interesting as it may be) is a pretty weak predictor of how legal academics teach and that our professional experiences have a greater impact on how we perceive and teach about the law.
