The Most "Conservative" Law Faculties?
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My comment the other day
that Sai Prakash's move from USD to Virginia give UVA the strongest
"conservative" public law group of any law school in the country
prompted one reader to ask about other "conservative" faculties.
Bear in mind, of course, that terms like "liberal" and "conservative" operate as indexicals: what they refer to depends on the speaker. From a global or cosmopolitan standpoint, the vast, vast majority of law faculties in the U.S. are conservative or "on the right" on most major issues (except perhaps some issues of so-called "identity politics" or "diversity"). But from within the US, the terms "liberal" and "conservative" pick out different concerns: conservative law faculties are friendlier to market-based solutions, rather than government regulation; to judicial restraint rather than aggressive judicial review; to "originalist" theories of interpretation rather than "moral" or "evolving standards of decency" readings of the constitution; to cost-benefit analysis; to restrictive, rather than, capacious interpretations of individual rights; to federalism and limitations on federal power; and so on.
I'll focus on the "public law" groups, that is, those faculty working in those fields where ideological purity is most visible, such as constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, parts of international law, criminal procedure, and legislation and stautory interpretation. In the private law areas, positions on the right (pro-market solution, anti-regulatory, etc.) probably dominate most places, certainly at the elite law schools (hence the right-wing complexion of US law schools from a global perspective).
Among the top law schools, Northwestern University and University of Virginia are clearly both the farthest to the right and with the most prominent scholars, but Harvard University isn't far behind (with Goldsmith, Manning & Vermeule, among others). - - -





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