Legal Commentary

As so many lament the sky-rocketing cost of a legal education (tuition has increased far ahead of inflation), the debt students have to incur to obtain their law degree, and the pressure that the tanking economy has placed upon financial aid and public interest support, is this the dirty little secret no one is talking about: law professor salaries are largely responsible for this state of affairs?

Recently, headlines like this one screamed that law school tuition has run amok for a very bad reason:  due in major part to the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. These stories were based on a recent GAO report, which did indeed place blame on the rankings. According to the GAO, law school officials believe that "the move to a more hands-on, resource-intensive approach to legal education and competition among schools for higher rankings appear to be the main factors driving law school cost." The key is that last part about "competition among school for higher rankings" because, according to the GAO, "[t]o attract the best faculty, school officials reported that they may offer higher salaries." What that seems to boil down to is that law schools have been jacking up law professor salaries to get the best and the brightest and thus increase their reputational score in the rankings. Not an irrational strategy because reputational scores are by far the most influential criteria for the rankings (25%, when the next highest factor is 15%).

But is this strategy sustainable? Presumably, one justification for high law professor salaries is that law professors could make more (sometimes much more) on the private legal market as practitioners. It's a common law professor lament (especially for junior professors) that they make less (often MUCH less) than a just-graduated student in the first year of practice at a major national law firm. Traditionally, those firms have paid in lockstep (every member of any particular class makes the same salary), and first-year associates right out of law school have been paid $160,000.  Not including bonuses, which could be in the tens of thousands of dollars. A quick perusal of a recent law professor salary survey shows that few law professors can match such earnings.

Can law professors continue to justify their high salaries (at least as compared to most other academic disciplines)? That seems less than clear given that national law firm salaries are going down. So says the ABA Journal and esteemed colleague Bill Henderson, who believes that law firm models--and salary scales--are in the midst of a sea change. Without the potential of a ridiculously high starting salary, many potential law students will be unwilling to attend and pay for law school.

Shouldn't the result be downward pressure on law professor salaries?

And, if so, what options are most available to law professors to keep the dollars coming in?  A move into law school administration?  I've recently been told that an industry standard is to provide a 22.5% salary supplement for law professors who move into an associate dean position. But I have no idea whether that's correct.