I’ve done some work looking at law firms and where political contributions from each went among the largest law firms. I thought I’d try my hand at gathering some comparable data among law professor at law schools.

I drew FEC data from 2017 to early 2023 (when I started running data for this study). Contribution disclosure is only required for those who contribute more than $200, but many outlets like ActBlue or WinRed disclose even $1 contributions.

I looked for all faculty who self identified as a “law” “professor” as their occupation. That included professors of law and all potential titles, but it did not include professors with “legal” alone in the title, or those who identified as a law “teacher” or “educator.” Of course, if faculty members primarily self-identified as an “attorney” or some other title, they fell outside the filter. I then screened out anyone with the title “adjunct” or “emeritus/emerita” to return only full-time faculty members. It includes anyone in “doctrinal,” “clinical,” “research,” “writing,” “dean,” or other faculty roles, as long as “law” and “professor” appeared in the title.

The final data set had around 80,000 items. I sorted and standardized their institutions, the law schools they taught at. Some were more ambiguous (e.g., Was “UM” Michigan, Minnesota, or Maryland? Was “Widener” in Pennsylvania or Delaware?), but I tried to standardize as readily as I could.

I then coded all contributions as “Democratic,” “Republican,” or “other.” Some, like ActBlue or WinRed, are of course obvious. But I sifted through every label to identify whether they were Democratic- or Republican-leaning. OpenSecrets helped reveal if an ostensibly “neutral” political organization overwhelmingly contributed to candidates of one political party or another. Those whose contributions were at least 25% to each party I labeled “other.” So, too, were contributions to the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. These ended up being a trivial part of the data set.

I cleaned up the names of faculty. For instance, “William O’Connor” might sometimes label himself “Bill O’Connor” in some places, or “William OConnor” elsewhere. Data entry for contributors is often quite sloppy. I created a function that took the first five letters of a donor’s last name and the first letter of the first name to create a unique ID, eliminating any punctuation or spaces. I then spot checked to clean up situations where the “William” v. “Bill” scenario could arise. Undoubtedly, this method cleaned up most things but might have errors.

I then sifted through each school to identify how many faculty at each school contributes to Democratic, Republican, or other candidates. I also separately identified faculty who contributed to both Democratic and Republican candidates in this window. If faculty moved from one school to another in this window, it is possible that faculty member is listed twice.

In the end, I identified 3148 law faculty who contributed only to Democrats in this 5+ year span—95.9% of the data set of those identified as contributing to either Democrats or Republicans in this period. Another 88 (2.7%) contributed only to Republicans. And 48 others contributed to both Democrats and Republicans.

The dollar figures were likewise imbalanced but slightly less so. About $5.1 million went to Democrats in this period, about 92.3% of the total contributions to either Democrats or Republicans. About $425,000 went to Republicans. (Around $6000 went to others.)

Of course, there are limitations to this study like any others. For some law schools, law faculty were running for office (e.g., former Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren running for Senate and for President), and contributions could be skewed to support a colleague. Faculty can “contribute” in other ways, such as volunteering for a campaign or even work in an administration. Faculty might be very “political” in a sense but refuse to contribute to candidates.

That said, I was surprised to see very few cross-partisan contributions. Even a $1 contribution to, say, Senator Mitt Romney or Representative Liz Cheney would have put a Democratic-leaning faculty member into the contributor to both Democrats and Republicans. But the data reveals very few cross-partisan contributions.

The first chart breaks down total faculty who gave to Democrats, Republicans, or both at each school in this time period.

Next shows the dollars contributed at each school in this time period.

Raw figures for the faculty donors, and the total dollars contributed, are below.