Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Ideological Non-Diversity at UC-Irvine Law

Founding UC-Irvine law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is a deservedly prominent constitutional law scholar and outspoken left-liberal who has dedicated the new law school to “public interest” law, which is academic code for left-liberal cause advocacy lawyering. Nonetheless, Chemerinsky tells the LA Times that he intends to build a diverse faculty:

“It’s always been my goal that our law school will have no ideology. I don’t want to make a liberal law school or a conservative law school,” he said. “To the extent that conservatives had doubts about me, all I want is for them to give me a chance.”

In the article, the Times notes Chemerinsky’s considerable success at building a very impressive initial faculty. Yet, despite the luster a number of the hires bring to the school, it is not a particularly diverse group. To the contrary, it is a faculty whose members are all left of center and, in some cases, considerably left.

The most curious thing about the article for me, however, was how resigned the legal conservatives quoted by the Times are to the situation:

The assortment of professors brought on staff has dispelled concerns that Chemerinsky’s hiring fracas would undermine the school’s ability to recruit top faculty, and to do so quickly, said Robert Pushaw, a politically conservative constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University.

“It’s very difficult to persuade top law professors to leave their schools to join an upstart operation, but he’s hired some very high-profile people,” Pushaw said. “I’m guessing there won’t be a whole lot of McCain bumper stickers in the parking lot there, but that’s true of academia in general.”

These choices are indicative of Erwin’s pledge to make this not the typical law school,” said John Eastman, dean of Chapman University’s law school.

Eastman, whose school is known for its conservative bent, said the lineup was “a bit eclectic” and overall appeared to be slightly left of center, with several well-known liberals but no staunch conservatives.

The qualifications of the hires, he said, were “par for the course in higher legal education.”

The hires prompted tempered reactions from conservatives, who said the new staff did not appear to skew too heavily to the left.

Individual professors are bound to be less controversial than Chemerinsky, said Scott Baugh, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, who took issue with the way the appointment was handled because Chemerinsky was “not vetted out properly” and because he was a “polarizing figure.”

“Very few people expect higher educational systems to be dominated by conservative lecturers, so there are no surprises here,” Baugh said.

Pamela Karlan, a politically liberal law professor at Stanford University who serves on an advisory board to UCI law school, said the hires are best characterized by their interest in using law for public service.

“The people he has brought in are a fair cross section of top-tier legal academics, which means, of course, that they will tend to be moderate liberals,” she said. “But they’re not radicals.”

Liberals like Chemerinsky say that affirmative action is necessary so that a school can “look like” the community it serves. In this case, however, it seems to be okay with just about everybody that Chwemerinsky’s law school doesn’t reflect the ideological diversity of Orange County so long as it looks like the liberal academy. The sad thing is that prominent conservatives like Pushaw and Eastman seem to have accepted the state of things.

I’m the first to admit that the ideological bent of the academy is not entirely the result of discrimination against conservatives (although God knows that exists), but I also think law schools need to do a better job of conducting broad searches that have a reasonable chance of kicking up qualified conservatives.

Chemerinsky claims he’s doing such a search, but the proof will be in the pudding.