This brings me to my final point, the most important reason to care about intellectual diversity in law schools: Intellectual diversity matters to students. Without it, they are getting only half of a legal education. Again, at Georgetown, the ratio is three [Republicans] out of 120, and so most students will graduate without ever laying eyes on a Republican behind a lectern. In their three years in law school, they will simply never see what that looks like. How are they to learn how to persuade Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy, when they do not encounter a single professor with a similar perspective? Some say that liberal professors are careful to present both sides of the argument. But that does not suffice. Unsurprisingly, the liberal version of the conservative argument is generally a caricature of the actual conservative argument. To put this point most sharply, students are spending more than $150,000 on their legal education, and they are being taught how to argue against hypothetical Republicans. For that kind of money, they should at least learn to argue against real ones.
(Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, "Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy," Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 37 [winter 2014]: 137-43, at 142-3 [italics in original; footnote omitted])
Note from KBJ: The best explanation of the lack of intellectual diversity in law schools (actually, in academia generally) is cowardice. Progressives prefer comfort to challenge, safety to insecurity, and solidarity to controversy. It's easy to feel safe when everyone around you thinks and feels the way you do. Next question: Does academia produce cowards or do cowards gravitate to academia? Answer: both.
