The latest issue of Commentary ? not yet posted online ? includes an article adapted from Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson?s new book about left-leaning law schools.
Among its most interesting passages is one responding to Yale Law School dean Harold Koh?s 2005 speech to incoming students, during which Koh welcomed the new class as ?citizens of the republic of conscience.?
If the modern elite law school really counts as a republic of conscience, it is very nearly a one-party republic: Democrats at last count outnumbered Republicans 28 to 1 on the Stanford faculty, 23 to 1 at Columbia, while Harvard is said to have gone 30 years without hiring a single Republican (even as it formed a panel to fret about the need for more faculty diversity of other kinds). In 2008, law professors donated somewhere between 10 to 20 times as much to Democratic as to GOP White House contenders.
Olson?s musings about law school bring to mind Donna Martinez?s recent interview with George Leef, which focused on the extent to which law schools oversell the value of their degrees.
