The College Fix

A new study by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government finds that, while lawyers “on average are much more liberal than the general population,” judges “are more conservative than the average lawyer.”

And it’s the latter that is the problem, you see.

The New York Times reports:

“Politics plays a really significant role in shaping our judicial system,” said Maya Sen, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and one of the authors of the study. Since judges tend to be more conservative than lawyers, she said, it stands to reason that the officials who appoint judges and the voters who elect them are taking account of ideology. She said the phenomenon amounted to a politicization of the courts, driven largely by conservatives’ swimming against the political tide of the legal profession.

Got that? It’s “politicization” if judges’ viewpoints are out of step with those of lawyers … but lawyers’ viewpoints being out of step with the American public? Not a big deal, apparently.

Thankfully, law professor Eric Posner of the University of Chicago makes just this point:

“The authors argue that a court is politicized if the judges deviate from the ideology of the underlying ideological distribution of attorneys,” he said. “Maybe.”

But an equally powerful case could be made, he said, for viewing courts as politicized if they failed to reflect the ideology of people generally. “On this view,” Professor Posner continued, “we should congratulate rather than condemn Republicans for bringing much-needed ideological balance to the judiciary.”

Law professor Tracey George of Vanderbilt notes that the study examines this quite distinct feature of the American justice system: Unlike foreign legal systems, ours is not ideologically homogeneous.

Read the full article.

h/t Instapundit.

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