A new report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group, says liberal law professors dominate the teaching of election law at American law schools by nearly 7-to-1, a gap the group argues has real consequences for how election-integrity cases are decided in court.
PILF reviewed election-law courses and faculty at all 198 ABA-accredited law schools. Among the schools that offer election-law classes at all, the report found 76 left-leaning or liberal professors compared with just 12 who are right-of-center or conservative. Most election-law centers, the report notes, are housed at universities in blue states such as New York and California.
PILF also found that 70% of election-law classes at top schools are taught by professors the group characterizes as having a left-leaning ideological bias.
“There are so many left-wing lawyers in election law that it creates policy outcomes, election law changes, adapts, and election integrity statutes get struck down because there’s so many lawyers on the other side,” PILF President J. Christian Adams told Fox News Digital.
Adams said no one had previously quantified the ideological makeup of election-law faculty nationwide. “For the first time ever, Public Interest Legal Foundation went in and quantified the election law professors in the country and figured out if they’re liberal or conservative and it’s overwhelming. An absolute dangerous imbalance,” he said.
From Classroom to Courtroom
The report contends that law students are trained to challenge voter ID laws, citizenship-verification requirements, redistricting maps and voter-roll maintenance, then carry that training into liberal nonprofits and major law firms that litigate those same issues.
Course descriptions cited in the report reference “voter suppression,” racial and partisan gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, the Electoral College and “election subversion.” The report also points to specific offerings it considers ideologically driven, including Harvard’s “Bonobo Sisterhood” class, which examines what bonobos can teach humans about building a society free of male sexual coercion, along with election-law courses at Harvard, Michigan and UC Berkeley touching on social justice, racial inequity and proposals to restructure the Electoral College.
Adams pointed to his own experience litigating a redistricting case in Galveston County, Texas, as evidence of the imbalance playing out in real courtrooms. He said opposing counsel showed up in overwhelming numbers.
“In that trial, it was so many lawyers on the other side, not only at the regular lawyer table, they filled the jury box. It was like 25 to five.”
Adams said the left brings “a swarm of lawyers” to court, outnumbering conservatives “five, six, seven times” in some hearings, and added that “anytime voter ID hangs in the balance, the left sends an army,” while “conservatives defending election integrity just don’t have the horses.”
Campus Culture and Possible Fixes
Adams, who said he has spoken at 75 law schools, described a campus climate that discourages conservative participation. “There’s definitely a culture on campuses that makes it hard,” he said. “I’ve spoken at 75 law schools, and at many of them, conservatives show up as an anomaly rather than as active participants. But that’s not true everywhere.”
He said the shortage isn’t limited to ideologically driven schools. “A lot of schools that aren’t ideologically driven still don’t have election law programs. There’s no reason almost none of the law schools in Texas should teach election law. That’s something the legislature could fix by funding an election law chair at one of the state’s public universities.”
The report stops short of claiming every professor identified as left-leaning pushes a particular legal outcome, or that ideology alone decides election cases. Instead, PILF argues the imbalance shapes a pipeline: left-leaning professors introduce students to election law, those students move into voting-rights nonprofits and major law firms, and many eventually become the attorneys challenging election-integrity statutes in court — leaving conservative attorneys with fewer specialized colleagues and less institutional support.
“We can solve this problem of this dangerous imbalance in election litigation, but we have to start to solve it,” Adams told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital reached out to Harvard, UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan law schools for comment.
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