Conservatives may want to brush up on their collection of lawyer jokes, as a new study from researchers at Harvard and Stanford indicates that lawyers tend to lean left. Female lawyers, law professors, and public defenders are especially likely to be liberal, but all lawyers tend to grow more conservative with time.
Judges, by contrast, are more likely to be conservative — and the higher a judge's rank, the more likely he or she is to fall on the right of the political spectrum. This suggests that the strategy of focusing on judicial appointments by conservative politicians is paying off, though politicization of the judiciary varies considerably by state.
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