# Do lawyers really tend liberal?  Why?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-lawyers-really-tend-liberal-why/499000>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [June 7, 2009, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-lawyers-really-tend-liberal-why/499000 "2009-06-07T12:48:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\
**Post date:** [June 15, 2009, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-lawyers-really-tend-liberal-why/499000/41 "2009-06-15T22:43:08Z")

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> [@Fotheringay-Phipps](#):
>
> Regardless of who wins the lawsuit, the lawyers on both sides get paid.

Plaintiffs’ personal-injury attorneys usually work on contingency – if they win they get a percentage of the client’s recovery; if they lose they get nothing.

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**Author:** ![Richard\_Parker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/35a633/32.png) [@Richard\_Parker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_Parker)\
**Post date:** [June 15, 2009, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-lawyers-really-tend-liberal-why/499000/42 "2009-06-15T23:48:32Z")

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I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that attorneys overall lean liberal. And I think there would be a lot of factors behind that. But a big one is education. People with postgraduate degrees are disproportionately liberal. The vote split was nearly 60/40 among them in the last election. [Cite](http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1). When you consider that postgraduate education is correlated to both white race and male gender (which both correlate positively with Conservatism), that is really a rather remarkable result.

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**Author:** ![Fotheringay-Phipps](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/d9b06d/32.png) [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)\
**Post date:** [June 16, 2009, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-lawyers-really-tend-liberal-why/499000/43 "2009-06-16T17:00:31Z")

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> [@BrainGlutton](#):
>
> Plaintiffs’ personal-injury attorneys usually work on contingency – if they win they get a percentage of the client’s recovery; if they lose they get nothing.

That’s true.

But the context here is Wendell Wagner’s point (as I understood it) that while one might expect plaintiff’s personal injury lawyers to oppose anything that might work against lawsuits in their field, there are an equal number of lawyers on the opposing side. And my point here is that the lawyers on the other side also stand to gain by more liberal laws on these types of lawsuits.

So as a practical matter, all lawyers who work in that field have an interest in liberal laws on those types of lawsuits.

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