There is liberal favoritism at the 8 Ivy League colleges.

National Law Journal

Professor Says Ivy League Stiffs Conservative Justices

Are the nation’s Ivy League schools giving short shrift to conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices when they confer honorary degrees? A survey by one law professor suggests the answer is yes, and that the reason is ideology.

Of the 14 honorary degrees bestowed by Ivy League institutions to living justices, 12 went to those on the high court’s left side, said conservative legal scholar John McGinnis of Northwestern University School of Law. The two exceptions, from Brown and Yale, went to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative, he said.

“Honorary degrees are the highest symbol of recognition that universities can bestow,” McGinnis wrote in a recent post on the Online Library of Law and Liberty. “And the Ivy League retains the greatest reputation for excellence in American higher education. Thus, it is of more than a little interest that these institutions find excellence overwhelmingly in justices on the left of the judiciary.”

McGinnis, in an interview, said he is “generally interested in the question of the influence of elites on the structure of law, and, of course, the Ivy League is that.” That general interest became particular, he added, when he read that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was to receive another honorary degree. He decided to examine which justices were receiving Ivy League universities’ honorary degrees.