In this morning's Chicago Tribune, Jerold Solovy, the chairman emeritus of Jenner & Block, argues for an increase in federal judicial salaries. He offers the common comparison of current judicial salaries to judicial salaries in 1969. He also includes the following comparison: "Law school professors and deans make about twice as much as federal judges." District court judges make $169,300. This would put salaries for law school professors at about $338,600. Setting aside the deans, I assume some law school professors make this much, but why would he think law school professors in general make this much?
According to the 2007-2008 SALT survey of law school salaries (response rate=48%), the lowest median salary for full professors at a law school is $88,626 (District of Columbia Law School) and the highest is $206,000 (University of Michigan Law School). For assistant and associate professors, the median salaries are of course lower. So where is Solovy getting his estimate?
I would guess this salary estimate comes from Chief Justice Roberts' 2006 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, which Solovy quotes at one point, but some important qualifications got lost in the paraphrasing of the salary comparison. The Year-End Report said, "Today, federal district judges are paid substantially less than--about half--what the deans and senior law professors at top schools are paid." (p. 2)
That's "senior law professors at top schools," not law school professors generally.
Note: For criticisms of various arguments in favor of judicial salary increases, see Matthew Frank, Orin Kerr, and Ilya Somin.
UPDATE: An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Paul Volcker prompted a similar question about the $330,000 law professors last year. Volcker said, "Today, at $165,200, district judge salaries fall more than 50% below what many law school deans or their top professors make." Paul Caron responded here. It's like a game of telephone, taking us from "deans and senior law professors at top schools" (Roberts) to "many law school deans or their top professors" (Volcker) to "[l]aw school professors and deans" (Solovy).
This is interesting material; thank you. I would like to suggest that the figures given for law professor salaries appear to be from public institutions, whose budgets are public also. I agree with another commenter that salaries at private schools are likely to differ and in many cases be significantly higher.
Posted by: Law Librarian | 17 September 2008 at 10:11 AM
In the 2006-07 version of the survey, Harvard responded (strangely enough), with $241,300 as the median full professor salary. See here: http://www.saltlaw.org/~salt2007/files/uploads/SALT_salary_survey_2006-2007.pdf
Posted by: anon | 16 July 2008 at 12:47 PM
One of the comments to Caron's post indicates that the SALT numbers leave out many, if not most, top law schools (including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, NYU) -- and that it is likely those schools pay more (and perhaps significantly more) than those included in the SALT figures. In addition, law school professors also receive various perks (e.g., housing provided by NYU) that, if included in the salary calculations at FMV, would significantly bump up the calculations.
Posted by: notaprof | 14 July 2008 at 07:57 PM