Religiously Affiliated Law Schools and the Academy

Co-bloggers and readers may take interest in an article in the current issue of the Journal of Legal Education by Monte Stewart (formerly with BYU's law school) and Dennis Tolley (a statistics prof at BYU) entitled "Investigating Possible Bias: The American Legal Academy's View of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools." The authors were struck by the fact that practitioners tend to give religiously affiliated law schools a higher rating than fellow academics do in the annual U.S. News rankings, and the divergence between the two sets of scores is greater for religious schools than for secular schools. (For those not familiar with the all-important law school rankings, they are based in part on the school's reputation among academics and its reputation among judges and lawyers.) To try and isolate the possible bias, the authors conducted their own limited survey to rank the religiously affiliated law schools in order of their "conservatism" -- i.e., "the extent to which the American legal academy viewed each school as affiliated with and reflective of a religious tradition generally perceived to be conservative on contemporary cultural or moral issues such as abortion and homosexuality." Of the 44 religiously affiliated law schools (St. Thomas and Ave Maria were not included), the highest "conservatism" ratings went to (in order) Regent, BYU, Campbell, Mississippi College, Pepperdine, Notre Dame, and Catholic; the least "conservative" were Emory, Georgetown, and American.

The authors drew three primary conclusions from their analysis of the data:

The divergence between the respective assessments of academics and practitioners of religiously affiliated law schools is sufficiently greater than their divergence relative to secular law schools to be statistically significant.

The more conservative a religiously affiliated law school is generally perceived to be relative to contemporary cultural/moral issues, the lower the academics' assessment is, compared to that of the practitioners.

The divergence noted in each of the first two conclusions is not due to any differential in scholarly activity as measured by the number of articles published annually either per school or per faculty member.

This may simply be confirming what has been widely known, but it is worth a read, in any event.

Rob