Lawyers Tend to Tilt Left Liberal Progressive. Judges Don't. Fascinating NY Times piece.

According to a New York Times summary of research by political scientists, lawyers in the US are more liberal than the country as a whole and this is especially true of government lawyers, law professors, public defenders, female lawyers and lawyers who graduated from the Top 14 law schools. In contrast, judges are ideologically close to the country as a whole, with some (state and federal trial court) slightly more liberal and others (state high court and federal circuit court) slightly more conservative.

The New York Times summary: “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.

Politics, Ideology and State Supreme Court Justices

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Judith L. French, an appointed Republican seeking to retain her seat in the Nov. 4 election, said at a GOP rally “I am a Republican and you should vote for me. You’re going to hear from your elected officials, and I see a lot of them in the crowd. Let me tell you something: The Ohio Supreme Court is the backstop for all those other votes you are going to cast. Whatever the governor does, whatever your state representative, your state senator does, whatever they do, we are the ones that will decide whether it is constitutional; we decide whether it’s lawful. We decide what it means, and we decide how to implement it in a given case. So, forget all those other votes if you don’t keep the Ohio Supreme Court conservative,” French said.

I like the frank recognition that state supreme courts can overrule the legislature and governor and the implicit acknowledgement that a justice's political philosophy can influence her rulings. I elaborate on these points in Originalism, Balanced Legal Realism and Judicial Selection: A Case Study

Voter Knowledge of Judge Candidates’ Judicial Philosophies

Voter Knowledge of Candidates’ Judicial Philosophies by Craig M. Burnett of the University of North Carolina and Lydia Brashear Tiede, University of Houston - Department of Political Science.  The Abstract:      

Judicial elections are typical “down ballot” elections, rarely capturing the interest of most voters. To help distinguish themselves at the polls, judicial candidates have begun to publish their decision-making philosophies with the apparent hope of informing voters. Using survey data collected during the 2012 elections, we explore how well individuals understand such philosophies.