Lawyers Liberal, Judges Further To The Right

A study of campaign contributions has found that lawyers tend to be more liberal than the general population, but judges are more conservative than attorneys. The political gap between lawyers and judges suggests politics plays a “really significant role in shaping our judicial system,” Maya Sen, political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and one of the study’s authors, told The New York Times. However, University of Chicago law professor Eric A. Posner said the data could also be seen to suggest that the right-leaning judges balanced out the overall politics of the legal field. “On this view, we should congratulate rather than condemn Republicans for bringing much-needed ideological balance to the judiciary,” he said.