Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm looking at a new study by Northwestern law professor James Lindgren examining how religious—or not, as the case may be—legal academics are, and how that compares with 20 years ago. Next up, I'm checking in on some big-ticket donations to ASU Law, UCLA Law, and on Michigan Law's clash with an unhappy donor. Plus, a Bob Dole plaza at Washburn Law? It could happen.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

 

Whither The Religious Law Professor?

An interesting article has been making the rounds in the legal blogosphere, and I can't resist delving in a bit given the discussion it has generated. It paper is titled, "The Religious Beliefs, Practices, and Experiences of Law Professors." The name is pretty self-explanatory. Author James Lindgren, a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, surveyed about 500 law professors on their religion, whether they believe in God, whether they attend religious services, and whether they have ever experienced discrimination based on their religion or seen it happen to others, among other questions.

The survey is a follow-up to Lindgren's 1997 article that covered similar ground, though the latest effort is more in-depth. The paper's big takeaway is that law professors are significantly less religious and less likely to believe in God than both the general population as a whole, and those with advanced degrees. That was also true back in 1997, but Lindgren's research shows that the religion gap among the legal academy has widened over the past two decades, meaning that law professors are even less God-fearing than they used to be. Delving in a little bit deeper, however, Lindgren's data shows that Christians are vastly underrepresented on law faculties as compared with the country as a whole, while Jewish law professors are overrepresented by the same criteria. Here are some of the key stats:

➤➤The percentage of law professors who identified themselves as Protestants dropped to 25% in 2017 from 32% in 1997. Among the general public, 49% are Protestant.

➤➤Nearly 20% of the 2017 law professor respondents identified as Jewish, down from nearly 27% in 1997. Today, 2% of the general population in Jewish.

➤➤Interestingly, the percentage of Catholic law professors has held steady over the last 20 years, at 13%. However, 23% of the general population identifies as Catholic.

➤➤The percentage of law professors who fall under the "no religion" category, which includes atheists and agnostics, rose from 26% in 1997 to 37% in 2017. By contrast, less than 22% of the general public reports having no religion.

➤➤In a somewhat strange finding, a larger number of 2017 law professor survey respondents—five—said they are pagan or pantheist, than the three who reported that they are Muslim. (Were the pagans just messing with the researchers? Hard to say.)

➤➤Among the law professors surveyed in 2017, 21% said they "know God exists," compared with nearly 59% of the general population. From a different angle, 24% of those law professors said they "don't believe in God," compared with little more than 4% of the general population.

So assuming that Lindgren's survey samples were representative of the legal professoriate as a whole and his data is solid, those are some interesting shifts in religious affiliation over time. His research goes deeper, however. About 10% of the surveyed law professors said they attend religious services at least once a week, compared with about a quarter of the general population.

One clear bright spot in the survey is that relatively few law professors report being discriminated against because of their religion. Among Jewish law professors, 10% said they had experienced religious discrimination in seeking or doing their jobs. That figure was 9% for Catholics and just shy of 7% for Protestant law professors. Less than 4% of non-religious law professors reported discrimination, though 22% of law professors from less common religions said they had experienced discrimination.

"[Law professors] are unrepresentative of the larger population, even the highly educated larger population," the article reads. "In the broader public, those with graduate and professional degrees are much closer in their religious preferences, beliefs, and practices to ordinary Americans than are law professors. Accordingly, most law students continue to be exposed primarily to a narrow range of viewpoints."

My take: I guess the real question here is, do the religious affiliations and belief of law professors matter? Lindgren clearly thinks so. After all, why conduct the survey if it's a moot point? But others aren't so sure it does matter, and I'll admit I'm on the fence about it. Here's USC law prof Michael Simkovic, writing on Brian Leiter's Law School Reports:

"Law professors should not be judged by their ideological beliefs, but by their academic rigor. Law professors should not be compared to the general U.S. population or members of congress, but rather to scientists."

Simkovic goes on to write that law professors, like scientists, are highly educated, high earners, and use data and analysis to reach conclusions. (Simkovic sites a study that concluded that 59% of scientists don't believe in God—far higher than the 24% among law professors.) Moreover, few subjects taught in law school have much to do with religious beliefs, he wrote.

 

Donors Giveth, Donors Taketh Away

We've had some interesting law school donation news over the past week. I'm going to start with a blast from the past.

Washburn University School of Law is trying to raise funds to dedicate an outdoor plaza to former U.S. senator and onetime presidential hopeful Bob Dole, an alum of its class of 1952. The Topeka school has plans for a new $33 million law school building, and now an anonymous donor has committed to matching funds donated to create an adjacent Bob Dole plaza—up to $1 million. Dole, now 96, said, "I am humbled to be recognized in this way," in a statement emailed to the law school community last week.

Next up: Two law schools have unveiled $5 million donations that will fund interesting new initiatives. First up, Arizona State University's law school has received $5 million from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. Half of the funding will be used to restore a historic 1914 building in Los Angeles, to be used by several academic programs—while the other half will create an endowment for ASU Law's Indian Legal Program's Indian Gaming and Tribal Self-Governance Programs.

UCLA Law also snagged a $5 million gift from alumna and attorney Alicia Miñana and her husband, Rob Lovelace. The school is using the funds to establish a Center for Immigration Law and Policy, which will bolster UCLA's existing immigration law offerings including several clinics and faculty-led trips to the Texas border, as well as support immigration scholarship and additional programming.

And finally: A donor to the University of Michigan Law School is pulling his $2 million commitment to the school, saying that it didn't use a previous gift in the way it had promised. Alum Lance Johnson gave the Ann Arbor school $150,000 to hold an annual seminar to study the feasibility of appointing independent legal counsel to kids involved in custody disputes, but he says the event was only held sporadically and that school officials refused the request to return his money. As a result, Johnson said he is canceling a $2 million bequest to the school that was to be paid upon his death. (A school spokesman said no such formal agreement had been established.)

Extra Credit Reading

Loyola University New Orleans Law professor Chunlin Leonhard is under a federally mandated quarantine at a military base in California after being evacuated out of Wuhan, China, due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Students at Yale Law School protested Paul Weiss at a recruiting event last week, calling on the firm to end its representation of ExxonMobil in climate change litigation.

A new study by Florida International University College of Law professor Howard Wasserman details which federal judges have the most former clerks in the legal academy.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]