A deep left-wing bias infuses large, prestigious law firms. That may sound like a truism to anyone remotely familiar with Big Law, but recent research highlights just how pernicious this lopsidedness is.

A number of previous studies over the years have shown the liberal partisanship of major law firms by looking at factors like political donations made by their attorneys or employees. But a new and interesting piece on this topic was recently published in Per Curiam, the online edition of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and it deserves particular attention. The author is Derek Muller, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, who conducted a comprehensive survey of the ideological leanings of the biggest law firms’ pro bono work at the Supreme Court as a way of gaining insight into the firms’ ideological leanings.

Specifically, Muller looked at pro bono amicus briefs submitted in Supreme Court merits docket cases. Such briefs reflect the choices of the attorneys filing them as well as the priorities of their firms, which back them financially by allowing the large expenditures of attorney and staff time needed to generate amicus briefs. Over the four years between October 2018 and June 2022, Muller counted 851 amicus briefs (of the 3,280 filed in total) that were likely submitted pro bono by firms among the top 100 measured by gross revenue (the “Am Law 100”). Overall, 64% of those briefs were aligned with the liberal position versus 31% with the conservative position, while the balance were in support of neither party.

Remember one of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s favorite conspiracy theories about conservative capture of the Court—that they were aided by “amicus flotillas?” Well, it turns out there is an amicus flotilla. It’s just coming from the Left.

The liberal skew reflected in these figures is tremendous. This 2:1 ratio of liberal to conservative amicus briefs amounts to a difference of hundreds of briefs filed over the span of only a few years—and, given the value of the time spent producing them, millions of dollars in virtual subsidies or gifts from the firms. The entire dataset in the Muller study suggests that the total net gift from Am Law 100 firms to liberal non-profits and activists over four years totals $25 million or more.

What perhaps is even more striking is that about $9 million of that value covers just the five highest salience cases in which entities on the Left tried to persuade the Supreme Court.

You see, the ideological disparity in filings became starker as the cases became more salient (with salience determined by the number of amicus briefs submitted). As measured by Professor Muller, the lowest salience grouping had fewer than 30 amicus briefs filed, moderate salience saw at least 30 but fewer than 60 briefs, and highest salience ran at 60 or more briefs. Muller found that the liberal-to-conservative ratio ran 62.4% to 37.6% in lowest salience cases and 67.7% to 32.3% in moderate salience cases. But in the five highest salience cases—two involving abortion, two involving sexual orientation and/or gender identity, and one involving the Second Amendment—94.9% of amicus briefs identified with the liberal position versus 5.1% with the conservative position.

While a 95% commitment to liberal groups at the Supreme Court in the highest salience cases is attention-getting in and of itself, there is also some eye-catching firm-by-firm data to focus on. The bias is not uniform across firms. While a small handful of firms had a conservative bias, and other firms were close to the overall 2:1 bias for liberals, there were many firms with overwhelming skew toward liberal positions, where the firm was single-handedly providing a seven-figure boost to liberal causes at the Supreme Court.

For example, WilmerHale, best known for representing Harvard and Penn in the recent, infamous hearings before Congress over antisemitism on college campuses that led to their presidents’ ouster, individually provided an approximately $2 million subsidy in attorney and staff time to liberal groups and activists in the dataset’s four years. For other law firms—like Orrick and O’Melveny—such gifts surpassed $1 million. And there is Paul Weiss, which sent over $1 million in value to liberal groups while filing zero amicus briefs for conservatives.

Even beyond the context of such briefs, we know that a liberal monoculture afflicts so many top firms. Kirkland & Ellis might have proven an exception to the rule, but after its partner Paul Clement, perhaps the preeminent Supreme Court advocate of our time, won an epic Second Amendment victory in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the firm reacted by giving him the choice of dropping his politically unpopular clients or leaving the firm altogether.

While it might not come as a surprise in our age of woke capitalism, Muller’s study quantifies how the Big Law apparatus in our nation is firmly putting its weight behind liberal causes. It does so overwhelmingly in the most consequential and ideological cases before the Supreme Court, creating a massive, mostly hidden, boost to the Left. And this, remember, is in addition to the vast dominance the Left has in fundraising for issue advocacy, in the media, and in the capture of our universities.

Senator Whitehouse can stage as many tinfoil hat hearings as he would like trying to sell his theories of hegemonic conservative influence at the Supreme Court. But he has it backwards. Liberal donors and liberal law firms are pouring massive resources into Supreme Court briefing, without Sheldon Whitehouse and his allies batting an eye. Mainstream media outlets, including Politico, that parrot the Whitehouse line on amicus briefs but don’t acknowledge the new data from Professor Muller will only confirm that they operate more as an auxiliary to the Democratic Party than as objective journalists. It will be interesting to see what they do.

At a minimum, the findings from Professor Muller beg a lot of questions, inside and outside Big Law. Will Sheldon Whitehouse announce a subcommittee hearing on the Left’s capture of Big Law’s pro bono amicus brief practice before the Supreme Court? Will Heidi Przybyla investigate this phenomenon? Will law firms take a hard look at their own biases? I won’t hold my breath.