Kent points to an excellent article by Professor Richard Epstein in the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (vol. 39, no. 3).  The issue also contains an interesting student note on the history of the John M. Olin Fellowship program sponsored by the Federalist Society. 

As a fellow Olin fellow, I can attest to the strengths of the program.  Each year this competitive fellowship places smart, ambitious conservative and libertarian scholars at some of the finest law schools in the country.  My fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School was a time that I treasured, enjoying the privilege of working closely with the keen minds of people such as Stephen Morse, David Skeel, Stephanos Bibas, and Paul Robinson to name just a few. 

But the stark reality is that there is very little intellectual diversity in the legal academy and despite the efforts of the Olin Fellowship, conservative and libertarian thinking is an endangered species among law faculty: 

As Eugene Meyer, the President of the Federalist Society, observed, Dean Kagan both deserved and did not deserve credit for increasing ideological diversity on Harvard's faculty. Meyer posed the following hypothetical to illustrate his point: Say you have a school with 100 members on the faculty, one of whom is conservative. If you hire two more conservatives, do you say that the number of conservatives has tripled, or do you say that only three percent of the faculty is conservative?  It is also notable that in the ten years since Dean Kagan hired Manning, Goldsmith, and Vermeule, not a single conservative has been hired at Harvard (at 918-19). 

It is a real shame that such conditions continue in the Academy because it leads to an intellectual sterility that is at least partially responsible for irrelevancy of legal scholarship.   Judge Posner bemoans the flaccidity of legal scholarship - well when everyone is saying essentially the same thing then there isn't much insight to drive decision making.