[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.
By Teresa R. Manning
Real Clear Policy
Last week, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. At issue is Mississippi’s statute banning abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation; the law also notes milestones such as fetal heartbeat and organ function at even earlier stages of development. The case therefore challenges the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which in effect legalized abortion at any point in pregnancy and made abortion law a matter for the federal courts, rather than the state legislatures, by claiming that abortion was a right guaranteed by the federal Constitution.
Commentary about Dobbs has noted the Court’s so-called conservative Justices, though they’re probably more accurately described simply as those appointed by Republican Presidents. On one side are Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and John Roberts; and on the other are Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
This political composition actually seems to resemble the country’s right now — or what we’re told the country is — which is to say, the Court is divided. That sounds bad, of course. One might just as well say that the Court is not monolithic, which sounds better.
The same cannot be said, however, of American legal education, the system which produces our judges.
The National Association of Scholars has long tried to call attention to the rather shocking under-representation of Republicans at America’s law schools and the fact that actual conservatives were purged long ago. Democrats outnumber Republicans on faculty at a ratio of about 50 to 1, for example, and law professor political donations skew almost exclusively to progressive candidates. Law school publications routinely advocate not just abortion and euthanasia but gender ideology, illegal immigration, and every other pet cause of the political left. All this is said to be legal “scholarship” and is subsidized at state schools by tax dollars and at private schools by federal student loans, among other public subsidies, including Justice Department grants.
Most conspicuous and also relevant for abortion law is the complete absence of conservative women in legal academia with one study by Northwestern Law Professor James Lindgren finding, “Republican women are almost missing from law teaching.”
In fact, at Yale Law School, the alma mater for almost half the Justices on the Supreme Court, Professor Michael Stokes Paulsen found, “no law professors on its faculty … take the pro- life position: Every member of the Yale law faculty supports a legal right to abortion.”
Why do Supreme Court nominees receive a blinding spotlight while the politicized law schools which produce them get a news blackout?
In fact, one might marvel that the Court has the balance it does given our leftwing law schools. But upon reflection, it’s no wonder. The nomination process is designed to be a political check, even on the judiciary, called “the least political branch.” No such check exists on American legal education.
But in the end, this political check for the judiciary is more appearance than reality: Most of these purportedly conservative Justices eventually betray the Presidents and Americans who support them: Reagan appointees Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy are most notorious with highly questionable opinions on both abortion and same-sex marriage; and more recently it’s more of the same with Trump appointees Gorsuch and Coney Barrett with predictable opinions favoring gender ideology and vaccine mandates.
Why do judges always end up tilting left?
Well, law schools. You can’t get healthy fish from these contaminated waters.
American legal education was not always like this. Before the 1960s, most law professors were real lawyers who taught classes in the morning and worked in legal practice in the afternoon. Because they were counsel to real people with real problems, fanciful ideologies and publications could not go very far. Reality itself was a check.
Today, most law professors have never tried a case, have never argued an appeal, and have never represented a real client. In other words, they’re not lawyers at all.
Instead, they’re ideologues surrounded by other ideologues, reinforcing each other’s radical political positions in an impregnable echo chamber. No reality check whatsoever. And they then serve not just as gatekeepers for the rest of the professoriate but also for the judiciary. Is it really any wonder we get endless abortion wars in court?
When real expertise, understanding and experience are absent or denigrated, ideology fills the void. In American legal education today, as in most of American higher education, ideology is everything.
But talking heads don’t want you to know this. So, they’ll chatter about “conservatives” on the Supreme Court and say nothing about legal and higher education.
Teresa R. Manning is Director of Policy at the National Association of Scholars.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.
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