External Funding for Legal Scholarship

Because a handful of my research projects over the years has benefited from various government and foundation grants (and hopefully more in the future), I am especially sensitive to institutional (law school) support for such research projects and, in particular, my duties as a PI on external grants.  Although external research grants remain somewhat anomalous within law schools, they are nothing less than "oxygen" throughout most research universities (just ask, e.g., your medical school and engineering dept. colleagues).  Moreover, research opportunities germane to legal scholars, while comparatively small, seem to be on the rise (e.g., NSF, NIJ, etc.).  Finally, anecdotal evidence suggests a slight trend in the law school world tilting toward sponsored research or, more accurately, greater awareness and appreciation of it.

To the extent that my hunches are correct, I welcome comments from others about their experiences running external grants through law schools.  For example, do folks encounter some flexibility regarding their institutions' indirect charging policies?  Course buy-out practices?  Should law schools create their own internal administrative infrastructure to assist in administering research grants or, rather, draw on existing university infrastructures (but almost assuredly wait in line for service behind some massive NIH grants)? Are external grants below a certain threshold ($50,000, $100,000) simply not worth the hassle?

(Finally, I'll just state for the record--and in the off chance that my Dean lurks on this blog--that my experience at CLS remains wonderful across all dimensions.)

Comments

[Mark Hall]

I'm a relatively rare law prof. with extensive experience in grant-getting and administration because I'm also on the medical school faculty, where my appointment requires me to secure grant funding for roughly half my salary. That's why I run all my grants through the medical school. It's true that they have more administrative infrastructure, but that's often as much a curse as a blessing. At the law school, there is sufficient admin. support through the central univ. if you already have some experience as a PI. But, for most law prof's who have to learn how to do this from scratch, my advice would be to start by partnering with someone (probably in another dept.) who knows the ropes. Otherwise, the learning curve is awfully steep, and frustrating.

Regarding whether it's worth the effort, one good use of even small grants is to support summer salary for those who are on 9-10 month contracts.

[Laura Beth Nielsen]

This post ties in with lots of other issues we have been talking about in the past few weeks. External funding will require IRB approval and provide a nice review of the research methodology so those are 2 GREAT benefits for seeking and (ideally) getting outside funding.

On the issue of the post, administering grants: As soon as there is enough funding coming in from granting organizations, it becomes very good for the law school to administer the grants. The administering agency gets a cut for overhead.

In our departments, the incentives are huge to run the grant through the department not just for the overhead but also so we can fund our graduate assistants in the form of Research Assistant jobs. Lots of law students would love to work with us on research (espcially if they are planning to try to become a legal academic) and could use the money.

So, I think there are lots of good reasons to encourage our law schools to administer these grants.