To listen to most of the press and a great deal of the blogosphere, you'd think so. Time and again we hear that they're nothing but knuckle-dragging bullies and extortionists, routinely forcing innocent people in society's lower classes to falsely swear guilt in order to escape some "draconian" (do you ever hear of any other kind?) sentence.
Several days ago, Adam Liptak of the NYT wrote a fascinating piece that discusses the political inclinations of lawyers. The piece was focused on the politics of judges, and introduced by the title, "Why Judges Tilt to the Right."
Now you would think, from that title, that you're about to read that judges are somewhere off there, between, say, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee, which under any normal definition would be "tilting right."
Wrongo. You have to read down the page to find out that most judges tilt left. But I thought what was said about prosecutors was even more interesting.
It turns out that the article features what has to be a deliberately deceitful title. Judges "tilt right" only when the reference group is other lawyers -- a bunch that, as the article acknowledges, tilts left when compared with the public at large.
My goodness.
The most instructive item in the article is this graph:
What does the graph tell us?
First, it tells us that judges in fact do not tilt to the right; they tilt to the left. We know this because the graph shows that state lower court judges lean to the left, and state lower court judges vastly outnumber all other judges combined. It's only a small exaggeration to say that, as a practical matter, justice in this country consists of what state lower court judges do day-to-day. And state court judges are, as we now see, clearly liberal.
Second, it tells us that government lawyers generally are the most liberal category of all, outpacing none other than Hillary Clinton. Following just behind are (no surprises here) law professors and public defenders, who turn out politically to be peas in a pod. No wonder almost everything on SSRN sounds like it was written by William Kunstler.
Third, it tells us that all lawyers taken together lean to the left, and not by a small margin.
Most fascinating for my purposes, though, is its finding that those Neanderthal prosecutors are slightly more liberal than lawyers as a whole, more liberal than judges, and, of course, more liberal than the public. A part of the graph you have to click on the article to see shows that they are far more liberal than such Republican social moderates as Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.
These findings are published, mind you, not by Sean Hannity on Fox and Friends, but by the well-respected Adam Liptak in the New York Times. They're findings worth remembering next time someone from the defense bar starts screeching that the prosecutor's office is just a bunch of right wing fruitcakes.
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