  Hadronic polarization and the related anisotropy of the dilepton angular
distribution are studied for the reaction $\pi N \rightarrow Ne^+ e^-$. We
employ consistent effective interactions for baryon resonances up to spin-5/2,
where non-physical degrees of freedom are eliminated, to compute the anisotropy
coefficients for isolated intermediate baryon resonances. It is shown that the
spin and parity of the intermediate baryon resonance is reflected in the
angular dependence of the anisotropy coefficient. We then compute the
anisotropy coefficient including the $N(1520)$ and $N(1440)$ resonances, which
are essential at the collision energy of the recent data obtained by the HADES
collaboration on this reaction. We conclude that the anisotropy coefficient
provides useful constraints for unravelling the resonance contributions to this
process.
