Following up on my previous post on the article by Adam Bonica (Stanford; Google Scholar), Adam Chilton (Chicago; Google Scholar), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & Maya Sen (Harvard; Google Scholar), The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity:  the authors have a new paper, Ideological Concordance Between Students and Professors:

The largely liberal composition of American university faculties is frequently lamented in academic discourse and public debate, largely out of concern that professors "brainwash" younger generations with left-leaning principles. However, these complaints often fail to acknowledge that university students are also overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus possible that university professors are more liberal than the American public but more conservative than their students. In this article, we develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of students and professors in American law schools over more than a twenty-year period to estimate the degree of ideological concordance in the legal academy. We find that although professors have become more liberal over time, they have also become more conservative than their students. …

We also explore differences in ideological concordance at the law school level. Different schools have developed reputations as having more liberal or more conservative faculty and students, which could translate into notable differences in ideological concordance across law schools. Table 2 reports our concordance measure separately for the top 50 law schools. Among these law schools, four were ideologically balanced during our sample period: Baylor, Northwestern, UCLA, and Yale. The three law schools with the most liberal professors compared to students are three public law schools that are located in relatively conservative states: Indiana University, Bloomington (+23 points), Ohio State University (+18 points), and Florida State University (+16 points).

At the other end of the scale, the law schools with the fewest liberal professors compared to students are George Mason (-10 points), U.C. Davis (-6 points), and Berkeley/Emory/Stanford (-4 points). Perhaps surprisingly, some of the law schools where students are exposed to a relatively higher share of professors who are more conservative than them are not just schools with reputations for having conservative faculty, like George Mason, but also those with reputations for having a particularly liberal faculty, like Berkeley.

Jonathan H. Adler (Case Western; Google Scholar), Who's More Liberal, Law Professors or Their Students?:

[T]he study relies upon data between 1988 and 2011, but it is interesting nonetheless. One has to wonder, however, whether anything has changed in the academy over the past fourteen years. Did law professors continue to become more liberal over this time? And, if so, did students as well?

One other thing worth noting is that the authors explicitly consider whether law professors are influencing the ideology of their students, and conclude that this is unlikely. On this point, they write:

Another possible concern with the validity of our results is that the correspondence between student and professor ideology may be driven by professors having a causal impact on their students' ideology. The reason that this is a concern is that students largely make political donations after law school, and any correspondence between professors and students could be driven by the students' ideology being moved by the professors' ideologies.

Although it is certainly possible that professors exert some influence on law students' political views, we believe this is unlikely to be sufficient to drive our results. Importantly, although there is some evidence of peer effects on ideology from college students' roommates (Strother et al., 2021), there is no general evidence suggesting that exposure to a liberal environment in college moves students to become more liberal (Mariani and Hewitt, 2008). Moreover, by the time students attend law school, it is more likely that their ideology is stable (Green et al., 2004; Bonica, 2014). Relatedly, there is evidence that judges do not affect the ideology of their law clerks (Bonica et al., 2019). Although law school is likely an important life experience, clerking is typically thought to be an intense experience where recent law graduates work in extremely close quarters with judges. If clerking does not change a recent law graduate's ideological leanings, it is reasonable to think that law professors also would not have a large influence.

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