Selecting a Compatible Law School as a Female Legal Student

Politicians make laws and law is political. Law school is no exception to the presence of politics. The political beliefs that predominate in any given law school can have a strong influence on women’s experiences. You may decide, as one of my interviewees at a politically incompatible law school admitted, “to go to the best law school I got into.”

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If Its Tasteless and Odorless, It's Probably Politics

First, be aware that politics plays an important role in many law schools. It’s not a coincidence that all the political talk shows and op-ed pages have been heavy with law professors in the last few years. In the seventies, a law professor, Thomas Emerson of Yale, did the heavy lifting on the arguments in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. One of the con law teachers at Chicago, Professor Philip Kurland, made the arguments about integrated bathrooms that were ultimately used to defeat the ERA. In 1998, Professor Jonathan Turley, of George Washington Law School in D.C.was aTV fixture, arguing that each of Bill Clinton’s legal defenses was groundless special pleading. A GW colleague of Turley’s, Professor Jeffrey Rosen, is a leader in the movement to undo the protections against sexual harassment. When she was still at Harvard, law professor Susan Estrich of the University of Southern California managed Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign. Although politics tend to be hottest at more elite institutions, where the teachers and the students really regard themselves as in .training for national politic1 leadership rp^st law schools have some political “feel” to them.

Second, you need to know what the dominant political agenda is at the schools you’re considering. (I say “dominant” because most law schools tolerate a range of political positions wider than the range of the faculty we saw at, say, George Mason. However, even if not representative of a majority of the faculty or students, one overall political/legal position usually dominates the majority of interactions.) I don’t just mean whether the dean voted Democratic or Republican in the last election or whether the constitutional law teachers think the abortion rights decision was a terrible mistake, although these are indicators of the dominant norm at most places.

Even if it seems as if you’ve found a relatively apolitical place, political questions are inherent in every aspect of the law school curriculum, not just in the obvious ways like your professors appearing on talk TV or what’s taught in constitutional law classes on desegregating schools or protecting abortion rights. For example, tax law can be very political. You probably know that the last couple of years have witnessed a debate over the taxation of capital gains, like the profit on stock investments, which is in part a political decision about how wealth should be distributed. Recently, Congress changed the tax law. What you may not know is that for a generation before Congress acted, the issue of whether capital gains, which mostly go to people who are already wealthy, should be treated the same as income tax on wages was the subject around the nation. I first heard the arguments about how capital gains should be taxed in tax class in 1967!

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Tort class (the law of personal injuries) can be very political. “Tort reform,” for instance, seeks to change the ability of juries to levy huge punitive damages on defendants like doctors or car manufacturers, a political decision about how a government agency should rail powerful private players to account. Torts is one of the required courses in any first year of law school, and, like the tax teachers, torts professors in law schools have been taking positions on “tort reform” for decades. Law students often miss the political content of their course material. For example, one of the teachers in the required first-year torts class at the University of Minnesota Law School uses a textbook that favors tort “reform” to limit the power of the courts. But when I asked the students there if their tort class had a particular “political” point of view, they looked bewildered. They didn’t know favoring tort reform was political. They’d never even heard of any other way to think about the matter. The exchange was typical:

Ms. Minnesota: “Now that I think about it, no other point of view came up; we used Richard Epstein’s book [one of the leading conservative law and economics-type law professors in the country]. I’m not aware of other positions on torts. I’m sure we had other discussion, because it’s an open, casual class that’s very informal, but Farber [the torts teacher] is pretty happy with Epstein’s book.”

LH: “What about concepts like corrective justice [using the legal system to correct the wrong of, say, making a riskier car to save money] and moral obligation?”
Minnesota: “In criminal law. We heard about it in torts, but it’s not a big point.”

LH: “What do you think of the political environment at the University of Minnesota Law School?”

Minnesota: “I don’t know what you mean.”

If Its Constitutional Law, It's Probably Politics

Although politics permeates the law school curriculum, you’re not wrong to think that a lot of politics in law and in law schools is concentrated in the area of constitutional law. In America, as Alexis de Tocqueville said centuries ago, every social question sooner or later comes to the courts. Certainly, in the last half century, the core questions of wealth, race, and sex that still rend the society have all come to the courts—indeed, to the Supreme Court—in the form of constitutional questions., In 1954, the Supreme Court decided that racially segregated schools were illegal; in 1973, that certain criminal restraints on abortion violated women’s rights; three years later, that campaign contributions were speech and could not be regulated; in 1995, that most affirmative action was also not allowed. So constitutional law is a class where political issues are front and center.

When I was a law student at the University of Chicago Law School in the sixties, I learned that Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to desegregate the public schools, was an illegal act of overreaching by unelected judges attempting to put their personal political preferences into the words of the Founding Fathers. After all, the Constitution says nothing about “integration,” only that laws must be “equal.” Really smart, careful judges would never have desegregated the schools, one of the con law teachers contended.

Now, thirty years later, only a few law professors are still willing to say in public that the really smart people would realize that the Constitution permits racially segregated schools. Apparently, however, someone at the University of Chicago is still using the argument that federal judges are not elected to argue against less well-accepted social change. In an interview last fall, Ms. U of C, a second-year student at the University of Chicago, volunteered to me how the law school had taught her to think more carefully, using as her example that the law school had taught her to doubt whether the Supreme Court should have voided state laws making abortion criminal in 1973 in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision. After all, she informed me, the Court is unelected, and careful judges would have noticed that the Constitution is silent about abortion.

In an example from a little farther up the lakefront, when a third-year Northwestern student wrote a paper on the constitutionality of the law that funds initiatives to reduce domestic violence, she reported that she couldn’t find a single con law teacher at Northwestern to lay out the view that the Violence Against Women Act was legit, as a constitutional matter. This despite the fact that the legal precedents supporting it go back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the thirties.

Neutral Principles Sometimes Just Mean Men on Top

Criticizing the abortion decision and arguing that the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional could rest on a clear commitment to the constitutional mandate of a limited judiciary and a limited federal government, as Ms. U of C described it. There are, indeed, times when the health of the constitutional system must prevail, even when it produces really nasty results. The Supreme Court has narrowly taken that position in protecting people who burn the American flag, for instance, in the interests of protecting the constitutional commitment to free speech.

In the particular examples of segregated schools and criminal abortions, however, I’m skeptical. After all, racial segregation and female sexual punishment operate so strongly to the advantage of^ the people making the arguments! Moreover, I have a test to figure out whether someone is really committed to judicial restraint or whether they just don’t like women to get abortions. The test goes as follows. The Constitution doesn’t use the words “affirmative action,” any more than it says “abortion.” Yet, for some years people have been arguing that the Constitution forbids public law schools like the University of Texas to follow publicly generated programs of affirmative action in order to avoid turning into all white schools. To be consistent, someone who thinks the unelected federal judges shouldn’t overturn state laws making abortion criminal should also think that the judges shouldn’t overturn the laws requiring state schools to use affirmative action to integrate their otherwise all-white schools. Because the Constitution is silent on both matters.

This is a good test, because supporting affirmative action is not so obviously in the interest of the white men making the arguments, so the test forces them to choose between self-interest and constitutional purity. Applying my test for consistency, I asked Ms. U of C whether the University of Chicago had caused her to doubt whether an unelected Supreme Court should have struck down the state of Texas’s democratically enacted affirmative action program as they did in a 1995 case. She said the University of Chicago Law School had not caused her to doubt whether the Court was also wrong in undoing affirmative action. She had only learned to doubt the wisdom of Roe v. Wade.

Although these are examples from a conservative point of view, political liberals often engage in the same politically charged “legal” analysis. For example, the same liberal professors, like NYU’s Ronald Dworkin, who think the constitutional protections of free speech will suffer mortal damage if feminists succeed :n getting pornographic speech reined in are the biggest supporters of limiting the amount of money that can be spent for political speech in election campaigns. Dworkin’s theory of the First Amendment allows the government to limit political speech but not sexual speech, just like the Chicago theory of the Fourteenth Amendment allows states to make abortion criminal but so far hasn’t been used to defend states that mandate affirmative action.

So the third thing you need to know is that positions with a lot of political consequences are put forward in the law school classroom as mere applications of “neutral principles” of law by people who would not be willing to live with the full application of their so-called theories, when white men would suffer the consequences. When positions are presented as flowing naturally from neutral principles, it’s hard for a young woman with no legal training or experience to think up the arguments for the other side. Even Ms. U of C, a brilliantly successful law member of the University of Chicago Law Review, hadn’t figured out that her teacher’s “neutral” arguments about the rigorous limits on the Court’s powers to invalidate democratically enacted abortion laws should have made him a defender of democratically enacted affirmative action. Since she hadn’t figured it out, she couldn’t press him on it, so she’ll never know whether his arguments are so compelling that she, too, must abandon her political support for abortion rights in the interests of constitutional purity or whether his legal arguments are just a guise for his political distaste for abortion rights.

Why Men on Top Feel Heavy

Of course, all women don’t believe in choice, affirmative action, or in the federal law addressing the problem of domestic violence, and all women law students probably don’t believe all the same things, either. If you agree that the states should be free to criminalize abortion, that affirmative action is an unjust system that victimizes white men, and that the states are doing a good enough job dealing with domestic violence, or that pornography is just harmless sexy pictures and the free play of sexual harassment is the foundation of a free society, learning the law in a political context that favors criminalized abortion, sexual harassment, and states rights in domestic violence matters will be compatible with your beliefs.

Almost every school also employs people of diverse positions on contested matters. Mary Becker, one of the most vocal feminist professors in America, teaches at Chicago and Chicago gave a part-time appointment to famed feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon. The affirmative action “test” I use to identify authentic white male constitutional defenders was suggested to me years ago by Geoffrey Stone, formerly the dean there. But despite some diversity, being marginal to the group dominating the law school has a host of spoken and unspoken disadvantages.

The people who share the dominant political view usually dominate the hiring process, so they reproduce themselves a lot. They are confidently vocal in faculty workshops and seminars, so the people on the outs feel silenced. Take, for example, George Washington Law School. Although, as we will see when we analyze the catalog, GW (worst Femscore in Status Group #3) has a very diverse set of political views included in its faculty, one source described the place as “dominated by people doing legal theory and they’re intimidating the other faculty. They have a political agenda posing as an intellectual agenda. A Heritage Foundation [a very conservative think tank] agenda.” Another player at GW put it more gently. That person thought the faculty workshops were okay, but stayed away from the faculty lounge, dominated by what another source described as folks conservative in orientation. The faculty, one source said, “pridfed] themselves on not being ‘liberal’ like Georgetown [law school].”

Sometimes, the dominant group allies with students to criticize and challenge the marginal teachers from within the classroom. Feeling silenced, the minority-thinking teachers lose confidence in their ideas and they lose involvement in the institution. At George Washington, “a lot of people deal with this by dropping out. They spend a lot of time at other jobs [consulting, working abroad]. Doors are shut. A lot of people are not there.” So they are there less and thus less available to the students who need them. As one woman at GW put it, “I can’t believe it took me until my third year of law school to find someone [on the faculty] to talk to.”

If you disagree with the dominant political view being advanced in the law school you attend, you may find law school to be more of a challenge than it has to be. As one star Northwestern woman student put it after extensive exposure to the political teachings there, “I wanted to know that my politics weren’t completely inconsistent with the Constitution.”

Essentially, a politically infused law school is asking you to abandon your political beliefs in the interest of the system you’re going to be a part of. The Princeton Review’s Pre-Law Companion puts it this way: “Law students are taught to remove their ‘selves’ from the analytic process and apply an ostensibly objective ‘legal analysis.’ ” But people don’t just pick up political beliefs like choosing a skirt length. Usually what people believe politically is a product of the way they were raised, how they were educated up to law school, and where they see their self-interest to lie. So in addition to worrying about whether your law professors are giving you the straight story about what the Constitution really requires (mine were sure wrong about Brown), another reason to be concerned about the political atmosphere of the law school you choose is that abandoning previously held political beliefs may be painful for you.

The politics of law school is particularly important for women, because issues involving gender justice are heavily contested right now, so, at incompatible law schools, women are often being asked to abandon their political beliefs on subjects particular to them as women—abortion rights, affirmative action, domestic violence, sexual harassment. In some of these areas, the interests of men as a group and women’s interests are at odds. A job that goes to a woman under an affirmative action program is a job that a man doesn’t get; the overwhelming majority of domestic violence incidents involves male violence against females, not the reverse; and women are the overwhelming majority of the victims of rape and sexual harassment and an undetectable percentage of the offenders under the law of rape.

So women who have to change their minds about abortion rights in order to think like lawyers are being asked to abandon not only beliefs, but also beliefs in which self-interest, and even self-love, is deeply involved. To fit in with the dominant political belief system I just described, they have to say, for instance, that they should be sent to jail if they try to escape the consequences of their sexuality through abortion. They don’t ever deserve an extra chance at a job. The L.A. police are good enough for them if their husband decides to take a swing at them. University faculty should be free to hit on their students for sex. Women law students who disagree with their teachers about women’s issues seem to face a tough choice: They can advocate for themselves or they can win the approval of the authority figures in their new world, but not both.

Finally, women students are asked to abandon their self-interest just as their self-esteem is under assault from the whole system of legal education. Again, from the Princeton Review: “The much trumpeted learning to think like a lawyer . . . involves a process of socialization, even indoctrination.” In law school, as in the brainwashing prisoner of war programs in the Korean War, the first goal of “indoctrination” is to force the subject to let go of his whole prior sense of self.
This process is harder on females, because studies show that female students start law school with lower self-esteem than their male classmates do anyway. Then certain methods of teaching ask them to abandon everything they’ve previously learned as a source of opinion. Finally, where a woman’s interests are at odds with the position the faculty advances, as in the abortion and domestic violence examples, the dominant political beliefs at some law schools ask them to do something even worse than disappear—to turn themselves into their own adversaries.

Study after study has shown that at this time in America, women are more liberal than men; they voice more liberal views and they vote much more heavily in the Democratic Party. Studies have shown that similar opinions prevail among women law students. I interviewed a dozen women at schools with well-established dominant political norms less liberal than those among American women as a group. Some of the women are on law review, and one is first in her class. They otherwise resembled a lo: of you: Most had come to school from public interest jobs; about half were still intent on pursuing them when they got out. The women pursued a rich array of different strategies to “succeed” in these politically inhospitable law schools. I’m going to share them with you, because, once you see where you’re admitted, regardless of the school’s politics, you too may decide “to go to the best law school I got into.” Here’s what the women did. They resisted, they chose not to share their true beliefs, they changed their beliefs, they adopted the assumption that the law school is just a place for the neutral transmission of technical trade knowledge, and they ignored the nature of the forces arrayed against them.

The Rebel

Michele Landis (her real name), Northwestern ’98, graduated at or near the very top of her class. Given that law school is to some extent an open contest for grades, when she applied, Michele, like many women, thought if she were willing to work hard and get good grades in the existing system, she would be rewarded. So, like many of the women I interviewed, she didn’t worry too much about whether the law school she chose had a women friendly faculty.

Michele, an unabashed feminist, was a controversial figure from the beginning, often eliciting angry attacks from her classmates. However, after she received her outstanding grades at the end of the first semester, she thought she was well on her way to a successful career. She believed that if she did well, her political differences with the mostly conservative members of the faculty would not matter. Accordingly, despite their differences of outlook, Michele selected a politically conservative law professor to supervise her ambitious individual research project.

Michele began to become alarmed about her prospects when, at the beginning of her second year, she learned that Northwestern had denied tenure to its rising young feminist star, and, worse, she heard that her adviser had written a detailed letter in the tenure process harshly critical of the feminist professor’s work.

When the time came for her to apply for a judicial clerkship, the critical stepping stone to the most prestigious jobs in the legal profession, Michele needed a letter of recommendation from someone close to her research. Michele knew that although law professors will usually write some sort of clerkship letter if a student asks them, the professors use the recommendation process to write what are in essence briefs on behalf of the prized students they really want to place, so when clerkship time rolls around, anything less than an unqualified recommendation can come across as a negative.

Professors are the Gatekeepers.

In light of the ongoing talk about her professors role in the tenure denial, Michele was worried enough about whether he would give her the kind of recommendation that actually gets students the highly competitive clerkships to go to his office and ask him point-blank whether, in light of their political disagreements, he could write her an unqualified recommendation. The professor responded that he could. In fact, he said he had “a draft here and it will be quite favorable and you’re going to be pleased,” and he detailed the favorable things he would be saying about her.

Because she had done so well in law school, Michele applied only to judges of the very prestigious federal circuit courts of appeals. She was particularly interested in Judge Stephen Reinhardt, from the Ninth Circuit, a liberal judge currently serving in the federal judiciary, and in the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, from which most Supreme Court Clerks are drawn. Although she was lucky enough to hear from Judge Reinhardt right away, Michele never heard from any judge on the D.C. Circuit. In fact, with one exception, Michele only heard from the most liberal of the federal judges, despite her excellent qualifications. Fortunately, Judge Reinhardt offered Michele a clerkship, v/hich she gratefully accepted.

She was disturbed, however, because several people warned her that her file included an “odd” letter from her adviser that might damage her. When she saw the letter, she realized that he had added a paragraph to the “very favorable” letter he had promised her. In it, she says, “He went on about how I was ‘quite active politically,’ as a ‘feminist and socialist,’ and that I ‘did not get along well with the law review editors last year’ because of conflict over my efforts to adopt an ‘affirmative action’ plan for law review membership selection.” He also added that she had organized meetings about “faculty appointment issues” that involved the President and Provost of the University. Michele believes that these comments were inappropriately added after the previous discussion of the letter’s contents and were essentially qualifications to the letter that would be interpreted as red flags warning judges to stay away.

Luckily for Michele, Stephen Reinhardt is the last judge to be deterred by political branding. Beyond doubt, however, some judges were deterred. After learning what her adviser had said about her, she confronted him. He denied that the letter was negative, and insisted that she wasn’t “damaged” by it anyway because “everyone knew that Judge Reinhardt was her top choice.” “I was crying and telling him how hurt I was because I thought we had a good relationship,” Michele says, “and he was sitting there mitigating my damages out loud. He never even said he was sorry. I don’t believe he was sorry.”

Michele confronted the law school administration about it. “I told the [Associate] Dean that here he is on this big upward mobility campaign, trying to increase Northwestern’s status relative to other law schools. A part of that campaign is to place more judicial clerks. And then the administration just stands by while a so called recommendation essentially tied a rock around the neck of the woman who was at the top of the class. How is that consistent with improving the law school’s standing?” The Dean refused to intercede on Michele’s behalf. She says, “I will bet the farm that this could not have happened to any man at the top of the class. Not in a million years.”

Getting the Ticket Punched

None of the women at the table in the Harold J. Green Lounge of the University of Chicago Law School was sorry she went. As she embarked upon her last year, one student said she “knew what she was getting into.” She had talked to female attorneys and knew that the U of C had a reputation for conservatism and extreme rigor. Ms. U of C, who had learned to reconsider the legitimacy of the abortion decision, decided before she started, “I’m going to treat it like a job.” Ms. Tough, ’99, said she had actually chosen Chicago because it was male and conservative. “This is the dominant school of thought in the legal profession, and that’s why I chose this school.” Ms. Instrumental also had a utilitarian attitude toward the law school: “One of my family friends said,‘If you want to be a really good lawyer, you’ll go to Chicago.’

Over at Northwestern, Ms. Marginal was following a similar strategy. Like Chicago’s Tough, she thought law school was probably no worse an environment than working would be (Marginal’s mother is a lawyer), and, like many of the students, she sees the somewhat more liberal world of undergraduate school as the aberration in an otherwise conservative world.

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Ms. Too Good for Harvard and a friend also used Northwestern for their purposes, rather than vice versa. Each of them was admitted to Harvard, and each of them turned it down to attend Northwestern instead. Although Ms. Friend said she was impressed with the atmosphere among the Northwestern students when she visited (more social, less competitive), each was heavily influenced by the money in the Wigmore scholarships Northwestern gave them to come. “I wanted to go to law school to do public interest work,” Ms. Too Good said, “and when I got the Wigmore, I said, here’s my opportunity. I don’t have to wind up really poor and have to go to a firm. I might go to Harvard and hate it and wind up indebted.”Top of class; off waiting list. Each of these women began the law school experience feeling that they were in the driver’s seat. If anyone tried to brainwash them, he’d have to bring lots of soap.

Holding Your Tongue

Of the six women I interviewed at Chicago, only Ms. Instrumental had ever spoken up, as Michele Landis always did, to argue on behalf of the interests of women against a teacher. She described her statements, when she felt her criminal law professor had given inadequate attention to the battered woman in a domestic violence discussion, as “this infamous outburst in crim law class.” As this characterization reflects, Instrumental felt a lot of ambivalence about speaking up in opposition to her teacher and on behalf of women. Ms. Tough, who had intentionally chosen Chicago to toughen her up for the practice of law, disagreed with Ms. Instrumental. “I thought you were great,” she said. “Don’t you remember I came up to you after class and said so?” Instrumental did not remember Tough’s private expression of support for Instrumental’s public risk.

Too Good also got privately tired of hearing her teachers remind her to read the exact words of the Constitution, a generally conservative position. “I kept hearing [Constitutional law professor] Marty Redish say, ‘What’s in the text?’ I wanted a little more of [the liberal theories of Harvard’s] Larry Tribe. Rather than take Redish on directly, however, [I] just went to the library and read what Harvard had to say.”

Tough always does her speaking out in this private context. In addition to “supporting” Instrumental privately, she privately “pulled one of her classmates aside and told him what he was saying was offensive.” He responded, not surprisingly, that she had left him unconvinced and therefore unwilling to change his mind, but that he would stop saying the “offensive” thing where she could hear him. None of the other women reported any private disagreements.
Despite her silence, Instrumental felt that her core values hadn’t changed. Ms. U of C disagreed. Without interrupting the technical flow of information with politics, somehow her convictions did change. “I’m more incrementalist,” she said, and, you will recall, more skeptical about the activist role of the courts in protecting abortion rights.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

Ms. Tough did not try to convince her classmate he was wrong, just that he had offended her. In support of Tough’s restraint, Ms. U of C reported that in the first-year theory class, Elements of the Law, when people would try to express their beliefs in the rightness or wrongness of legal doctrines, the people in the class called the discussion “blah, blah, blah.” “I got mad sometimes when people got into it in class,” she continued, “and there’s technical information I want to get.”Tough agreed. “I feel like that’s not why I came to law school. Other people are good at it [blah, blah, blah], they’re good at applying it. . . . There was a seminar in Current Issues in Racism and the Law,” Tough (who is African American) went on, “and that’s why I didn’t take it.” So Tough and Ms. U of C essentially treated the law school as a place to get technical information about how to succeed at a legal career and stayed away from the deeper issues like racism and the law or the policy behind the abortion decision that might require them to embrace positions in the dominant Chicago context that would be hurtful to them as individuals.

Slap, Slap, Tickle, Tickle

When the University of Chicago faculty voted to make an offer to the nation’s premier feminist scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that some of the conservative students objected in a series of very public E-mails, invoking the conservative alumni and involving the conservative press. This E-mail writer used fairly graphic terms to express his displeasure:

Her [MacKinnon’s] books have been a downward spiral of slack scholarship and media baiting. . . . Kate [sic] is concerned with women’s free speech rights, particularly her own. . . . MacKinnon is a disgrace, and she has no place in an office next to the likes of Epstein, Posner, and Easterbrook. . . . She, with [philosopher and classicist Martha] Nussbaum, will represent a critical mass of radical feminism festering in the stacks.

Although he was displeased with “liberal” hires of any gender, the writer singled out for attack the quality of the handful of other female faculty members:

This quarter [Professor Martha Nussbaum] co-teaches Sexual Autonomy and the Law with [Professor Stephen] Schulhofer. Presumably Schulhofer provides the law and Nussbaum provides the Sexual Autonomy . . . [Professor] Tracy Meares (What can I say?) and [Professor] Emily Buss (. . . reasonably qualified).

When Ms. Tease (class of ’98) read the signature on the E-mail, she was surprised to find it came from someone in her singing group. Another supersuccessful law student, Tease said, “The guy who generated the E-mail was the nicest guy. Everyone in the singing group just gets along.” When asked whether she changed her mind about this nice guy since reading his E-mail thoughts, she responded, “I can’t be totally wrong, so it’s just a lot more complicated picture.” When I asked her what she liked about the E-mail writer, she said, “He teases me, which works very well with me.” So Tease managed to find something to like in a man who attacked every female member of their faculty. He teased her, after all.

Loving Well is the Best Revenge

The one theme that emerged from both groups was the value of a community of like-minded people. When Northwestern denied tenure to feminist legal historian Jane Larson, her advocates among the students just stuck with their “community—the public interest group, [liberal faculty] Len Rubinowitz and Larry Marshall, the Feminists for Social Change. Just like in any law school,” one of them opined, “as long as you’ve got your group, I think you feel okay.” Ms. Tough loved her classmates, but “her husband was her support group.” Instrumental and Ms. U of C thought the best thing they had going for them was their friendship with each other.

So is the glass half full or half empty? Each of the women emerged from their three years with a very prestigious and marketable law degree. Almost all of them said they had really enjoyed their law school experience. Michele did get a great clerkship. On the other hand, studies show that women come into law school with lower self-esteem, they have very mixed feelings about the experience of the Socratic method, their grades the first year are lower and therefore their access to law review is harder. It’s hard to measure the effect of having to conceal—even from themselves, in some cases—how different their views are from the views that are valued in the institution. If you go to a school where the dominant views are very different from yours, you add to that difficulty the task of figuring out when the law school position is the rational, technically correct position, which legitimately requires you to change your thinking, and when it’s just a bunch of people in power seeking to preserve their power over people like you. Law school requires enough learning without adding additional burdens on yourself.

Decoding a Law School Catalog

You can find out what the atmosphere in your prospective school is pretty easily. Just learn to read the catalog or the information on the school’s Web site. But it takes some interpretation. After all, lawyers are taught to “make the lesser argument appear the greater.” Nowhere is this truer than in a law school catalog. Even though law school is a major investment for students, law school catalogs are as reliable, for example, as home shopping catalogs, where all the models are six feet tall and weigh 120 pounds. Catalogs exist to make the law school look as good as possible to the general public and especially to the applicant pool, regardless of what’s actually going on. As one Columbia student told me, “The admissions office is a sales office. The brochure sells all this multicultural stuff, and then we wind up with white male teachers and a regressive social atmosphere.”

The Case of Columbia

Sure enough, Columbia’s 1997—98 catalog claims that Columbia provides a “Legal Education for a Changing Profession and World.” The word “diverse” and the synonyms for diversity— “different,” “myriad,” “perspectives”-—appear five times in the first paragraph. Twenty-eight pictures and biographies of Columbia’s finest, including representative members of its famed faculty, are displayed in a winsome way throughout the catalog. Seventeen, or 60 percent, of the twenty-eight portraits are women. Eleven are minorities. Asian Americans, African Americans, radical feminists, liberal feminists—Columbia’s catalog trumpets a veritable rainbow coalition of diversity. Justices, civil rights activists, playwrights and actors—Columbia’s catalog reports a cornucopia of careers.

Truth is, according to the American Bar Association, Columbia’s student population in 1996 was 44 percent female, not 60 percent female. (Incidentally, the population was also 33 percent minority, not 39 percent minority, as the catalog shows.) According to Columbia’s own faculty directory, its academic faculty was just under 17 percent female, way below the national average, even below the low average for the most elite schools. In addition, of the paltry ten women on Columbia’s academic faculty of fifty-eight, only seven, or 12 percent, were employed without also being married to or cohabitating with men on the faculty.

As to diverse careers, according to the Bar Association, just under 70 percent of the 1995 graduating class were working in law firms six months after graduation. Another 18 percent were clerking forjudges, a job usually leading to firm jobs after a year, with a small percentage leading to academic jobs. There was no category for playwrights. As for civil rights leaders, only 2.8 percent of Columbia’s 1995 class were working in public interest at all.

A BLACK OR FEMALE PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND BLACK OR FEMALE STUDENTS OR FACULTY

Although some schools do overrepresent women students in the pictures, there is no clear pattern of numerical overrepresentation. The University of Michigan catalog, for example, presents 45 percent female images; its student body in 1996 was 42 percent women, not a serious overage. Similarly, George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, presents 39 percent female images; its student body is 10 percent less female, at a low 36 percent. Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, shows 41 percent female faces, while the school is only 38 percent female. However, most schools are accurate or even underrepresent the female student presence. Florida State’s catalog images are 32 percent female, while its 1996 enrollment was 45 percent female; the Universityof Memphis pictured 34 percent females, while enrollment was a high 49 percent. Even schools with startlingly low female enrollment underrepresented their women in the catalog, like the University of Virginia (37 percent women, 26.9 percent pictured).

However numerically accurate, the women-friendly images in the pictures often bear little resemblance to the experiences women report or to the numerical data on women’s success. For example, the only picture of any student organization in the University of Chicago admissions guide is a snapshot of ten women from the Law Women’s Association playing field hockey on the university green. As we saw, a series of savage letters and E-mails from conservative students erupted in the national press in 1997 upon the announcement of the part-time appointment of feminist faculty member Catharine MacKinnon. Unless you’re a girl who just wants to have fun on the green, don’t be misled by the happy faces in the catalog.

A FEMALE PART-TIMER IS WORTH A THOUSAND FEMALE TENURED PROFESSORS

The catalogs probably are most misleading in their description of the faculty. Almost without exception, the catalogs don’t distinguish between academic tenured or tenure-track faculty and a host of other teaching types: clinical faculty, teachers of writing, librarians, visitors, adjuncts. Students are often very close to the people who teach them clinical practice or legal writing. In a just world, those teachers would be every bit as important to the law school as the academic tenured faculty, and, in a few places, they are. However, although some schools extend tenure to their clinical teachers or at least the director of the legal writing program or ask their academic faculty to teach legal writing, across the whole landscape of law schools, neither clinicians nor legal writing teachers generally exercise the kind of dominant influence in their schools that we discussed above. Many times, clinical courses or legal writing are taught pass/fail, and clinical courses are rarely included in the crucial first year. And, almost inevitably, there are many, many more women among the clinical, library, writing, visiting, and adjunct faculties.

As a result of these realities, although the listings aren’t always misleading, by not distinguishing, an overwhelming majority of the catalogs usually overstate the influence of women faculty. In my survey of 121 law school catalogs for accuracy, seventy-five of them—or about 60 percent—list and describe female faculty who don’t really matter in running the institution, pumping up the image of female faculty by including untenured skills teachers, librarians, and the like. The discrepancy can be quite great: The University of Dayton presents its faculty as 28 percent female; scrutiny reveals that the academic tenured or tenure-track faculty is only 15 percent; Franklin Pierce Law Center’s female count goes down from 30 percent to 16 percent. Most of the overstatement is in the range of eight or ten points: Baylor Law School has a total of 33 percent females listed—only 25 percent of the academic tenured or tenure-track faculty is female; Cardozo dips from 29 percent to 22 percent, Cincinnati from 37 percent to 29 percent, Fordham from 30 percent to 19 percent.

Although in 40 of the 121 schools the percentage of female faculty actually goes up when you change focus from the larger group to those in the high-status academic jobs, the increase is infinitesimal (six show no change). Only a handful of the schools sent catalogs that underrepresented the percentage of females in their core faculty by more than one or two points. Even then, the difference was still much smaller than the average overstatement in the overstatement group. So, for instance, the University of Memphis listed 30 percent female of all faculty, and had 31 percent female of academic faculty, and the University of Maine showed women as 37 percent of all faculty and 38 percent of aca-demic faculty. Since the overstatement of actual academic female faculty is common and large, and the understatement is rare and tiny, when you look at the total faculty list in a law school catalog, you can assume that it overstates the female percentage of the faculty who run the institution by a lot.

A LISTING OF COURSES IN WOMEN'S INTERESTS IS WORTH A THOUSAND ACTUAL COURSE OFFERINGS

The second way the catalog may fail to represent the experience you’re likely to have is in its listing of the courses offered. Brigham Young University, for example, lists in its catalog such courses as Family Law, Selected Urban Legal Problems, Domestic Relations, Law Help—Divorce Decree Enforcement, and Individual Employment Rights, but only Family Law appeared in its listing of courses for fall 1997. Louisiana State’s catalog spoke of teaching Matrimonial Regimes, Employment Discrimination, Family Law Mediation, Family Law Seminar, and Matrimonial Regimes Seminar, none of which appeared on Louisiana’s spring 1998 course list. Pepperdine School of Law, with only 13 percent female tenured or tenure-track academic faculty, sent out catalogs describing Advanced Family Law, Domestic Dispute Resolution, Family Law, Marriage and Family Law Seminar, Human Rights, and Employment Discrimination, but only Family Lav/ was offered in the spring course listing.

Family Law is the least political of gender-relevant courses, because it is often no more than a pure doctrinal course to teach you the content of the law of divorce, so you can represent clients getting divorced. Mind you, Family Law can be very political. The change in American family law in the 1970s and 1980s to allow no-fault divorce, for example, had an enormous impact on the fate of women in American society in the ensuing twenty-five years. However, Family Law, unlike, for example, Employ-ment Discrimination or Sex, Law, and Violence, can also be no more than a course covering the basic practice of law, rather than addressing the changing role of women in American law and life.

Minnesota professor Mary Lou Fellows alerted me to one last pitfall for the consumer. The admissions office at Minnesota often sends prospective students to meet her and Beverly Balos, her coteacher in the course Law and Violence, if they seem interested in gender issues in the law. But Mary Lou and Bev were away on leave last year, and the course is not “institutionalized” and “not reflective of the rest of the school,” so she believes if she’s not there, the course will disappear.
These courses may not be of interest to you. But if you are interested in a curriculum that addresses issues of concern to women, you don’t want to invest your hard-earned tuition money in a school that’s like those stores that advertise milk at 15 cents a gallon but only stock three gallons of milk on the shelf. Consumer law outlawed the “loss leader” advertising gambit in most jurisdictions decades ago. And law school’s a lot more money than a week’s worth of groceries. Before you plunk down your thousands, ask the admissions office for an actual printout of the courses offered that semester and the one before.

If you’re shy or don’t want to be identified as a troublemaker, many law schools have a Web site, or a part of their university Web site, with course listings. Any good guidebook, like the ABA Official Guide to Approved Law Schools, will include a listing of the Web site with the school’s other vital statistics. For instance, the University of Virginia has a Web site, www.law.virginia.edu/ index.htm, which includes the fall and spring enrollment information sheets, listing the courses offered for 1997-98. Although Virginia has a 39 percent female student body, a dismal 77 percent success rate for women making law review, and only 20 percent female academic tenure or tenure-track faculty, Virginia is a big law school, and the course offerings are extensive and interesting. In 1997—98,Virginia actually offered for enrollment: the Regulation of Sexuality, an International Human Rights Clinic, Family Law and a Family Law Clinic, Civil Rights Litigation, International Human Rights Law Seminar, Family Law, Regulating the Family, Sex and Gender, and Feminist Jurisprudence.

The Pervasive Presence of the Olin Foundation  

The catalog can also alert you to the Olin phenomenon. At the University of Chicago, for example, there is a John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics. “The aim of the program,” according to the catalog, “is to advance understanding of the effects of laws, and hence to enlighten both economic theory and law reform by systematic investigation of aspects of the legal system in a framework of economic analysis.” Anything could happen behind this language—for example, economic theory actually supports changing the present stay-at-home-mom-centered tax law to encourage women to engage in wage labor in order to raise the largest amount of revenue.

However, the John M. Olin Foundation, described in a recent report to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy as a “conservative foundation,” is unlikely to support any such thing. It was the Olin Foundation that partially funded antifeminist philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers to write and publish Wlw Stole Feminism?, a scathing attack on contemporary feminism, including a deeply questionable analysis of the history of domestic violence law. Olin and the “Four Sisters” conservative foundations fund the conservative position on welfare reform and oppose university efforts to constrain hate speech on campus. The Olin people, being extremely clever in their giving, invest their money at places where they think they can have an impact, so Olin programs in the catalog are again an indication of what the temperature of the institution is likely to be on issues like feminism, hate speech, and women in poverty. As the Albany Times- Union described it recently, conservative funders like the John M. Olin Foundation and a few others provided the University of Chicago with more than ten million dollars from 1992 to 1994 “to support legal studies opposed to government regulation of all kinds.”

How to Read a Faculty Biography

You also can extract a lot of information from the faculty biographies. Remember Judge Alex Kozinski’s description of law faculties as consisting solely of radical scholars, including “critical race theorists, radical feminists and gaylegal” scholars, and “traditional liberals,” who hate and fear the radicals just as the conservatives do, but are too “cowardly” to do anything about them? If Kozinski were right, you would expect to see law school faculties com-posed of about four equal parts: racial minorities, females, gays, and a “right wing” of cowardly white male members of the American Civil Liberties Union, circa 1964. Conservative as he is, the prospect of law schools like this understandably makes Kozinski anxious.

In fact, even a cursory look at the descriptions of most law faculties reflects that they mostly consist of heterosexual white males. Only one law school in the United States has an academic faculty that is more than half female, and only traditional black law schools have faculties that are more than one quarter racial minority. As tar as I know, no law school faculty is even 10 percent gay or lesbian.

It is possible, of course, that these heterosexual white men who make up most American faculties are mostly heterosexual white male radical feminists, heterosexual white male critical race scholars, and heterosexual white male advocates of gay rights as well as old-fashioned ACLU types. After all, one of the great advocates of racial justice in the twentieth century was Jack Greenberg, a white male lawyer for the NAACP. But we know, for example, that the legal profession is at least 25 percent female, while the faculties at many schools—Harvard, Duke, Columbia, Michigan, Chicago, Georgetown, University of Georgia, Vanderbilt, Texas, University of San Francisco, Colorado, Emory, Franklin Pierce, George Mason, Hofstra, Louisiana State, and many, many more—are far under that number. It’s hard to believe that schools full of Kozinski’s radical, gay, and feminist white men would have found so few women entitled to teach with them.

Here’s where the catalog can tell you a lot. Although some law schools catalogs, like Duke’s, just tell you the teachers’ degrees and areas of expertise, even a close-mouthed catalog contains a lot of information about the place. A quick count at Duke turns up the information that the Duke faculty is only around 20 percent female, a low number compared to most law schools, even elite law schools. But numbers are just the beginning of a good analysis. At Duke, for instance, some of the teachers list as areas of expertise “gender law and family law” (Katharine Bartlett), “AIDS issues” (Keith Brodie), or “application of literary theory to law” (Stanley Fish). Since important issues of gender law, AIDS, and literary theory all postdate 1964, you can assume these teachers are, if not radical, not conservative and may even be liberals of a post- 1964 sort.

Moreover, some biographies give a hint of political affiliation in. The form of employment depending on the political party of the American president when he or she worked there. None of the Duke faculty includes service in the Reagan Justice Department in his or her biography. However, the catalog reflects that Duke had two faculty members in high policy positions at Justice under Bill Clinton. Walter E. Dellinger III, whose expertise is in “constitutional law and civil rights,” was “on leave fall, 1996, to serve as acting Solicitor General of the United States” and Professor Christopher H. Schroeder was on leave the same fall to “serve as acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.”

Reading further, we learn that Duke professor Madeline Morris “consulted with Senator Deconcini [a Democrat] when he drafted legislation to address the problems of sexual crime and sexual harassment in the U.S. armed forces,” Professor H. Jefferson Powell, a constitutional law expert, “was a member of the litigation team that defended the Brady Gun Control Act against constitutional challenge,” William Reppy founded an animal rights group, and John Weistart “published an article on gender equity in the world of commercialized college sports.” Although one professor, Thomas D. Rowe, Jr., earned an appointment from William Rehnquist (to the group that drafts the rules of civil procedure), the picture on the whole is one of a faculty that is pretty liberal, politically Of the eleven schools in Status Group #1 (LSATs 166+), Duke ranked first for women’s success.

Compare this with a big D.C. school a category or two below Duke in status: George Washington. In our catalog search, GW had only a low 22 percent female faculty number and came in last in its category on women’s success. The GW catalog doesn’t tell you a lot in its faculty biographies: just their titles and degrees and whether they are full-time faculty or just untenured part-timers. But the information is available to you, if you know how to look.

First, the course listing in the catalog tells you who teaches what. Feminist Legal Theory is taught by someone named “Ridder.” A quick look at the full-time faculty reveals that no one named Ridder is included; the Feminist Legal Theory teacher is Stephanie Ridder, a part-time “Professorial Lecturer,” which usually means someone who just comes in for one course and makes most of their living practicing law or writing. Lecturers don’t vote on faculty matters or participate in other aspects of faculty governance, like planning the curriculum. GW has a big faculty— eighty-four lull-time and visiting faculty and administrators in the year Ms. Ridder taught Feminist Legal Theory—yet not one of them was teaching Feminist Legal Theory.

Second, look at the required first-year courses. The first year is the most important part of the law school experience. Get good grades there and you’ll get a firm job and maybe never have to compete as hard again! Most women report the first-year experience as the aspect of law school that most heavily shaped their self-image as lawyers, something that stays with you the rest of your professional life. At GW, 80 percent of the first-year classes (other than legal writing, which is roughly pass/fail) are taught by men. If you exclude the two classes taught by a visiting female, 86 percent of the first-year classes are taught by men. Since a big class like GW’s is broken into sections, a woman student at GW could go ler entire first year without seeing a female teacher in a graded, first-year course there, certainly without seeing a tenured or tenure-track permanent female teacher.

The second place to look is at who’s teaching con law. The con law professors are the pack leaders at most schools. As we have seen, constitutional law is the battle ground where most of the major political and legal battles been fought since the Supreme Court sent a black man back to slavery in the Dred Scott case in 1857. All tour con law teachers at Duke are white men. Three of the white male con law teachers at Duke have political records: one works for Bill Clinton, one argued for gun control, and one held a technical Rehnquist appointment. The fourth, William Van Alstyne, simply tells you that he was “twice named in polls of judges and lawyers as one of the most qualified persons in the country for the U.S. Supreme Court,” which probably means he’s one of those “cowardly liberals” Kozinski decried.

I happen to know from interviews that some of the constitutional theorists act like the alpha males at GW, but even if we didn’t know about the pecking order at GW, the catalog reveals that con law is required at GW, a sure sign of its place in the status hierarchy. A quick glance at the current catalog reveals that no women are teaching first-year con law there. The basic con law teachers are Barron, Dienes, Park, and Clark. The advanced con law classes are also taught by Jeffrey Rosen, Ira Lupu, and Peter Raven-Hansen. Rosen teaches the course on the Civil War amendments, which are the primary vehicles for legal equality in America.

Who are the men of GW con law? Although the catalog doesn’t tell you, in an instant on the Internet you can find out a lot of what you need to know. Just search for the school name and “law,” in this case, “George Washington” and “law,” and you will find their Web page at www.law.gwu.edu (as we have seen, almost all schools maintain such easy-to-find and informative Web pages now). GW lists faculty profiles including their pictures.

All seven of the current con law teachers at GW—Dienes, Barron, Park, Clark, Rosen, Lupu, and Raven-Hansen—are white men. Barron and Dienes are older—late fifties or sixties—and have the interest and expertise in the First Amendment typical of people who came of age at the time of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. Some of Barron’s interests have apparently diverted him away from the law school; he serves as legal consultant to the magazines U.S. News & World Report, Fast Company, and the Atlantic.

Barron or Dienes may have progressive commitments, but it is important to remember that an interest in free speech does not necessarily mean a progressive disposition? Free speech has changed a lot since it protected the views of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s. Now, as the New York Times reported in 1998, free speech has become the rallying cry of the extreme right, from abortion clinic protesters to tobacco companies to Senate Republicans resisting campaign finance reform, while more progressive types have begun to accept some restraints on speech. Since feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon began challenging the production and distribution of pornography in the mid 1970s, a gender chasm has developed between 1960s-era liberals on the one hand and many feminists on the other, with traditional liberals clinging to a broad and absolute interpretation of free speech—in the words of one of the most prominent traditional liberals, New York Law School professor Nadine Strossen, “defending pornography.”

Accordingly, a passionate interest in “free expression” should motivate the alert student to ask some further questions.
On their face, Park and Lupu don’t present particularly politicized profiles. Park is also older, with a background in a neutral- seeming subject, administrative law and university governance. Lupu is one of the leading national scholars on separation of Church and State; he wrote the brief for Americans Lfnited for Separation of Church and State, in the Supreme Court case that struck down as unconstitutional a congressional attempt to legislate some fairly ambitious protections for religious practices.

Clark and Rosen, hired in 1994 and 1996 respectively, are two of GW’s rising stars. Clark’s bio on the GW Web site tells a straightforward conservative story. After law school, he clerked for the famously conservative federal judge Robert Bork, whose criticism of the decisions protecting people’s use of birth control kept him off the Supreme Court, and then for the most conservative of all the justices, Antonin Scalia, the sole vote in favor of segregating the Virginia Military Institute. He worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, the most political of all departments in the Reagan Justice Department, and then for Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, one of the few big corporate law firms that regularly contributes to conservative think tanks and foundations.

Rosen presents a different picture: After law school, he clerked for liberal Abner Mikva, and he writes for publications traditionally regarded as liberal, such as the New Republic and the New York Times. Rosen teaches a course in the Civil War amendments, which abolished slavery and guaranteed the equal protection of the laws, a traditionally liberal subject. Remember, however, that the battle over the meaning of the Civil War amendments, like the First Amendment, has changed a lot since the sixties. Now, instead of being used to integrate the schools, for example, most of the Civil War amendment litigation involves using the Civil War amendments to roll back programs for integration like affirmative action, which white men have a heavy self-interest in reversing. So having a white male teaching the Civil War amendments should ring some bells. (My favorite example of professors you might think about learning from is O. J. Simpson’s lawyer, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who lists Domestic Relations as one of his subjects in the law school’s faculty directory.)

And, indeed, Rosen has written at length in opposition, explicit or thinly veiled, to affirmative action. In articles in the purportedly “liberal” journals, he decried the efforts of affirmative action supporters to recruit women to buttress the electoral position of affirmative action, supported California’s vote to ban affirmative action, and criticized President Clinton’s civil rights nominee, Bill Lann Lee, for arguing in favor of affirmative action.

On issues specific to women, Rosen has led a movement, more aggressive than any corporate interest group and more conservative than almost any member of the Supreme Court, to repeal the laws against sexual harassment. In 1993, he recommended that the Supreme Court rule in favor of an employer who asked his female employee to meet him at a motel to discuss her raise and fish in his pants pockets for change, calling the behavior “mild.” Not even the ultraconservative Justice Scalia agreed with that one, and the Supreme Court ruled unanimously the other way. In advance of the Supreme Court’s seven-to-two rulings sustaining and expanding legal protection against harassment in 1998, Rosen suggested repealing sexual harassment law altogether, as “profoundly inconsistent with the liberal ideal” because it restrains people’s speech and actions, and asked people to “rethink . . . their commitment to sexual harassment law.” If we aren’t willing to bump sex back into the war of all against all, he suggested recently that we make the law unenforceable by refusing to ask about it. After all, Rosen said on National Public Radio, “lying about sex is something that we’re naturally tempted to do.” Rosen’s relentless crusade in favor of unleashing sexual harassment recently elicited a letter of protest to the New Republic from Katherine Silbaugh, a generally centrist professor at Boston University School of Law:

For at least five years, Jeffrey Rosen has mounted an impressive public relations campaign in favor of restricting Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination when the claim is based on sexual harassment. We’ve heard enough. Substantively. Rosen has overstated the harms the law admittedly causes and, much more significantly, understated the harms the law prevents. He is certainly entitled to explicate his views, but there is another side to the sexual harassment story—one that is sensible to many working people and to many centrist jurists—and your readers deserve to hear about it.

Even on those rare occasions when the Civil War amendments are invoked in the traditional civil rights fashion, to end some vestiges of formal segregation, Rosen opposes the use of constitutional law ^Jor women, suggesting that the Supreme Court uphold the constitutionality of a gender discriminatory provision of the immigration law and bemoaning the prospect that the Court would (as it did) compel the state sponsored Virginia Military Institute to take girls.
If you look at everyone GW hired since 1990, say, you’ll see some diversity: GW hired six women, three of whom are racial minorities, and twenty men, at least two or three of whom are racial minorities. As these numbers reflect, unlike some other schools, GW did not increase its gender integration during any of its hiring in the past seven years; the 1991-98 hires are 23 percent female, and the whole faculty is 22 percent female as of last count, about 10 percent less female than the profession, at 25 percent.

The nineties classes did include people of diverse political backgrounds—new hires Lawrence Mitchell wrote a text on progressive corporate law, and the Pulitzer-nominated Stacked Deck: A Story of Selfishness in America. African American Paul Butler is the author of a wildly controversial argument for jury nullification in a racist society, Michael Selmi came from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the Civil Rights Division of Just ice, and a couple of other hires also clerked for liberal judges. On the other end, in addition to con law teachers Bradford Clark and Jeffrey Rosen, since 1990 GW hired Columbia’s law and economics maven Richard Pierce, along with Robert Tuttle, a member of the Christian Legal Society, which has litigated several of the antigay actions brought in the last few years. They also hired another alum of a Reagan judicial chambers, Jonathan Turley, and Gregory Maggs—who scored sort of a grand slam by working for Clarence Thomas, as well as Reagan justice Anthony Kennedy and the very conservative Joseph Sneed of the Ninth Circuit and, again, Robert Bork. Turley is a strange mix; in recent media he described himself as a liberal Democrat who voted for Ralph NaHer in ’96 hnr he’s been the chief legal pundit attacking Bill Clinton's affair and he represented the father accused of (but not found liable for) child sexual abuse in the notorious Dr. Elizabeth Morgan case.

Through interviews, I learned that none of the prestigious endowed professorships at GW are held by women, only two of the ten next most prestigious research professorships were held by women in 1997-98, and the Appointments Committee hasn’t been chaired by a woman since 1989! You could have gotten a good feeling for the degree of ideological diversity on the faculty from the Web site and a strong sense of who dominates from the low percentage of diverse hires as well as who dominates the prestigious con law curriculum. Again, it’s up to you. But if you don’t want to learn your constitutional law from someone who believes employers have a “liberal” right to hit up their workers for sex, you might inquire about what the faculty writes, who gets the endowed chairs, and who runs appointments.

The Federalist Society

Finally, the student organizations can be a tip-off, although this is harder to find out. All law schools have organizations like the Black Law Students’ Association and the Law Women. The existence of these groups says very little about the atmosphere of the school. The most self-consciously political student group in the country is the law-school-centered Federalist Society. Founded by Northwestern professor Steven Calabresi and a couple of friends at the Yale Law School fifteen years ago, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, as the society is officially known, was described recently in the National Law Journal as “a forum where the conservative and libertarian elite trade ideas and business cards and try to influence the next generation of thinkers and doers” and “a Justice Department in exile.” The Federalist Society establishes relationships with judges who participate in the society’s programs and hire members as clerks.

Although the National Law Journal reports that the Federalist Society only includes five thousand student members, the society wields power out of all proportion to its membership. For your purposes, the Federalist Society matters, because according to Yale professor Ian Ayres, “Floating [Federalist Society] on your resume is an important key to ‘feeder’ clerkships [to the Supreme Court], such as for [Ninth Circuit] Judge Alex Kozinski.” Getting a clerkship with a conservative judge like Kozinski became more valuable since the Federalist Society took control of the process of credentialing federal judges away from the 370,000-member ■American Bar Association in 1996; in the ensuing congressional term, conservatives managed to defeat most of President Clinton’s judicial nominees, including a substantial number of women judges. As a result of this development, there are fewer prestigious clerkships with judges who are not conservative, confronting ambitious law students who are not conservative with a choice between their principles and their prospects.

The single largest funder of the Federalist Society is the John M. Olin Foundation. There are chapters ot the Federalist Society at most law schools, including, as its elite founders like to boast, the “top twenty,” so it’s hard to go to law school without encountering the society, but it pays to ask how many of the faculty are actively involved. Before you plunk your money down, you may want to know if the law school you will be attending is one of the leading centers of Federalist Society activity, including the activity of placing your conservative classmates in prestigious clerkships.