It has to be Bebchuk

feeling secondly...Torts profs are paid too much to teach so little

Compared to the average banker or trader, most law professors earn very little. It's all comparative. I think that the 600k is a nice development.

I think the most generously compensated professor is...HOW THE HELL SHOULD I KNOW? Aside from that silly question, good post...finally!

What did the low-end Hedge Fund Manager say to the most generously compensated law professor in the nation?

Yale COULD use an international airport, Mr. Burns.

Bet Dershowitz is up there.

Law professors are certainly overpaid. After all, compare a law professor's salary with that of a history professor who may have spent close to 7 years researching and writing his thesis. Granted, the law professors likely have more law school debt. But they also get summers off to research and write. Not a bad existence.

Boycott. If you support McSame, you have nothing to offer me.

http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/09/david_lats_exhillaryites_for_p.php

9: But most history professors couldn't hack magna cum laude at HLS or Chicago or SLS. They weren't graded on the strength of their essays or classwork, but, rather, on their ability to go through a low-rent, low-risk channel in order to become an academic.

Like it or not, 9, law professors are worth their salt because they suffered through a meritocracy in order to obtain their spots. I would bet that the average UG liberal arts professor would be lucky to crack median at any T10.

I agree with #11. Getting a PhD in a soft science is total bullshit except if you attend one of the most elite schools.

Law Professors are easily the smartest liberal arts professors at their university, if not the smartest professors. They deserve every penny. These people are often brilliant.

As a junior corporate associate, I identify with your redline/late night work comments! Way to resonate with the constituency, Elie!

"offfered"

grammar mistakes are nothing compared to a glaring spelling typo.

honestly 150k is a great salary for such an easy job.

Many of the top-25ish schools in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and to a certain extent Texas) often pay huge sums (but I am sure not $600k) to lure well-known city-educated professors into their small college communities.

My opinion: If some dude who sits around and publishes 2 - 4 papers per year can demand a $600,000 salary, then good for him. I love the free market.

The "brilliance" of law professors, vis a vie others in the academy, is routinely overstated among lawyer/law school types.

Mystal,

It's Dave RIFKIN, not David Rivkin. Also, he's the one who pointed it out "via" Prof. Caron, not vice versa.

Lumpy to $600k!

19: Here's a quick anecdote to illustrate that you're wrong.

When I was an undergraduate in a non-legal subject, there was a CCN-graduate who taught Critical Theory. He had earned his PhD. from another Ivy League school after practicing at a corporate law firm for three or four years.

One day, I asked him why he hadn't become a law professor. He rattled off some perfunctory answer about how he "liked the (non-legal subject) better."

It turns out that he wasn't even on his law school's LR. According to rumors, he had graduated below the median.

18, Chicago (U of C, Northwestern) and Austin (UT) are the middle of nowhere?

If you mean U of I, the school is at most, a 2 hour drive from Chicago. How is that any different than Yale?

Awesome. Privative high schools and you will see top talent and high salaries gravitate towards secondary education as well. The market is an amazing thing.

18. Chicago (U of C, NW) and Austin (UT) are the middle of nowhere?

If you are referring to U of I, which is at most 2 hours from Chicago, how is that different than Yale, in that metropolis of New Haven, Conneticut?

22: Illinois Law is in Urbana-Champaign, which is four hours away from Chicago. Iowa is the same distance.

Minnesota is in Minneapolis, a thriving, albeit chilly, metropolis. I don't see why you would have to "lure" anyone out to such a great city.

11, you clearly have no idea what is involved in getting a PhD or an academic job. You make two laughably false claims.
The academic route is not "low risk." It is the highest risk market you can imagine. Anyone who can get into a decent ph.d. program would be virtually guaranteed a job at big law if they had gone to law school, but going the ph.d. route they are much more likely to be forced to string together crappy temporary and low paying jobs in hopes of finding a long term job with a liveable salary. In most academic fields - history is a great example - only a small portion of hot shots get good academic jobs. The rest struggle.

And second, the hot shots are separated from the rest almost entirely on the strength of essays and classwork.

- former academic turned lawyer

25, assuming you are also 18, you are an idiot.

Champaign is 135 interstate miles away from downtown Chicago.

Note, I did not argue Minneapois, although I could have. It is a decent city.

Note, I did argue Austin, and you had no reply.

My advice to 25/18: Don't talk about what you do not know.

"I would bet that the average UG liberal arts professor would be lucky to crack median at any T10."

This is stupid. Law professors are paid highly because lawyers get paid highly in general, not because qualifying to be a professor is so hard, you law student babies. Law school is easy. Writing a dissertation is hard. The job market in other academic disciplines is much more competitive, and the people who have jobs, even at TTT schools, are way smarter than your average law school grad. Think about it for a second. You get to do what you want with minimal supervision, you get life tenure, only have to go in about two days a week. The competition for those positions is intense among extremely smart people. On the other hand, any idiot can graduate from a T10 school and get a firm job.

21, has it occurred to you that prof might not have been at the top of his class precisely for the reason he did not care too much for law?

26: No, they couldn't have.

Getting into a PhD. program is so easy, it's risible. You assume that the same candidates could have matriculated at a top five law school, where BigLaw is virtually guaranteed.

But that's an absurd assumption! There's plenty of deadwood in PhD. programs, and kids at HLS or Chicago are among the smartest you will ever meet. It is much harder to get into Harvard Law than Harvard Sociology, much less hacking it once you're there.

When I used low-risk, I meant low-risk in terms of being assured some academic work, even adjunct, when you graduate. In Law, even Yale graduates have no assurance that they'll find academic work. It's a stunningly difficult meritocracy that's filled to the brim with brilliance.

I would characterize more than a majority of my professors in law school as "very smart" to "brilliant." However, that doesn't quite address the point. How much value do they add to my legal education (and that of my classmates)?
$600k over a year, I'd guess that comes out to about $1k per student per semester. I'm positive top legal professors contribute at least that much value.
I think the only reason people balk at $600k is because of the culture here in America undervaluing the contributions of educators. Most educators are not worth six-figures (although if salaries increased, we'd see more talent), but the top educators are well worth the price. I wouldn't bat an eye at seven-figure salaries for top law professors.

"The job market in other academic disciplines is much more competitive, and the people who have jobs, even at TTT schools, are way smarter than your average law school grad."

I doubt it. The average law school grad? Yes. The average magna cum laude SLS grad that clerked on SCOTUS? NO. And it's usually the latter that end up becoming law professors.

GULC professors are regarded as some of the best in their field within the confines of the beltway. They truly are some of academia's best and brightest.

22- Because Yale is only a half hour or so from Hartford, one of the biggest legal markets in the country.

31: Except they're not being paid to teach and add value to the students, genius. If that were the case, the average clinical professor would be raking in seven figures and private jets.

30, you're way off. 16, 18, and 30 are right.

It's definitely easier to get into Harvard Law School than it is to get into a comparable Ph.D. program.

Succeeding in law school is easier than succeeding in grad school. Law school is definitely easier than writing a dissertation.

And, coming out of law school is definitely way less risky than coming out of a Ph.D. program. Your prospects for getting a job are MUCH higher coming out of law school

I've done both, and law school is definitely easier.

It would be funny if the professor in question were Hanson.

"Your prospects for getting a job are MUCH higher coming out of law school"

Literally the worst understatement I've seen on ATL. If by "much" you mean " more or less 100%," then I agree with you. Even Harvard can place no more than 50% of its English doctorate students in academia.

"easier Harvard Law School than it is to get into a comparable Ph.D. program."

Where are you getting this? I would argue the exact opposite. Every year, there are 100,000 people clamoring to get into Harvard Law.

34. Yeah, I bet all the law professors jump for joy at being close to Hartford and its 120,000 people in the "lbiggest legal market".

39- I didn't say it was the biggest legal market, but it is a top legal market. Very sophisticated work is done in the national firms that have a Hartford presence. Trust me.

If it's a big name in corporate law, then why shouldn't the top law school in the country pay him what most corporate partners at Vault 100 firms make? Hell, that's less than the partners I work for...

Of course, corporations prepared me to be a corporate lawyer to the same extent that watching LA Law or Ally McBeal could prepare you to be a firm lawyer. Not very much.

"What did the low-end Hedge Fund Manager say to the most generously compensated law professor in the nation?"
__________________________________________

You work about 1% of the hours that I do, with absolutely no accountability?

"What did the low-end Hedge Fund Manager say to the most generously compensated law professor in the nation?"

The hours you work are comparable to mine, and you gross about 1% of what I take home each year.

43 is a winner!

Lesson: if you have a bright child, send him to a HWS business school instead of HYS.

"What did the low-end Hedge Fund Manager say to the most generously compensated law professor in the nation?"

Don't worry. You can work at Yale and live in NYC. Just borrow one of my private jets.

44=GULC troll.

43 here, just sayin' that law profs spend tons of time doing their crazy research, kissing each others asses, etc.....and partners in BigLaw even more so....never understood why anyone would want to be a partner in a law firm instead of going into IB, hedge fund management, etc. I guess not everyone makes the cut.

47: the legal profession's dirty little secret is that none of them are any good at math. ;)

"What did the low-end Hedge Fund Manager say to the most generously compensated law professor in the nation?"

The hours you work are comparable to mine, and you gross about 1% of what I take home each year.
_________________________________________

What fantasy-land are you living in where hedge fund managers work fewer hours than law professors? What are you, a legal secretary at Skadden? You don't have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.

How hard can it possibly be to pick a bunch of stocks and buy them? That takes -- what? -- ten minutes? And then what? Telling people that your hedge fund yield a 400% because it utilizes a special brand of median-sized mutual funds?

That's twenty minutes right there and you just earned 400 million dollars.

49- Fuck off. Profs at my law school worked their butts off; they were always available. Maybe things were different at your TTT.

Yeah, okay r51. I'm sure "profs at your law school worked their butts off" and it was no big deal.

36, Let's see, in 2007 the acceptance rate at HLS was 12%. 6,984 apps 817 admits

Just searching quickly, I found the admission statistics for Princeton University for 2006 across all graduate programs broken down by field though not department, but by most accounts Princeton has a large number of highly ranked departments.

The rates were as follows:
Social Sciences 2,249 apps 206 admits 9% accept rate
Humanities 1,471 apps 142 admits 10 % accept rate
Natural Sciences and Mathematics 1,795 apps 310 admits 17% accept rate

Seems pretty comparable to me.

Whoops, I was trying to back you up 36, but I ended up sounding like I was contradicting you. Sorry.

53: It's not comparable because graduate admissions are less predictable. Instead of the same 180/4.0 types sweeping every school, it's more scattershot, and Princeton rejects can easily find homes at Harvard.

37-- that would rock

Two reasons for high LS prof salaries:

1) Many, many law profs have multiple graduate degrees.

2) The opportunity cost of working in legal (or other professional) academia is very high--if they weren't profs, they could be making much, much more as partners/doctors/managers, and so the market forces salaries up to compete.

If it's Coates, he also makes $900/hr consulting on litigation, like the Cerberus/United rentals litigation. Not a bad gig.

"But most history professors couldn't hack magna cum laude at HLS or Chicago or SLS. They weren't graded on the strength of their essays or classwork...."

Academics are pretty much *only* assessed on the strength of their potential for contributing to existing scholarship, which is a combination of their writing skills and their dissertation which, unlike a law school exam, is book-length and takes several years to complete. Your merit is calculated over years of research and writing, not a two-hour exam. There is no such thing as lucking into anything in academia and there are absolutely no shortcuts.

I've been a student in both settings and, while I found law school extremely challenging, most law students I knew absolutely couldn't have hacked the self-motivation required in academia. What I loved most about law school was being told what to do and precisely when to do it - a far cry from graduate school, where you have to come up with original ideas entirely on your own.

57: I doubt it. Most law professors work as counsel, eliminating some of the opportunity cost issues, and many of them went into the field because they wanted more steady, reasonable hours.

Multiple graduate degrees doesn't mean anything. There are plenty of starving, unemployed Philosophy doctorates.

John Coates?

John Coates?

59: Coming up with new ideas is easy. It's much harder to beat some of the smartest students you've ever met on a strict curve.

Here are three new dissertations for you. I made them up right now:

"The Opportunity Cost of Keynesian Economics: Diminishing Marginal Utility as Derived by Not Working on Other Economic Theories" -- Economics

"''I Am A Tree': Longing and Desire in the songs of Guided by Voices as Read Through a Barthesian Matrix" -- English department

"The Egyptian Orient and Napoleon" -- best history essay

"The Egyptian Orient and Napoleon" -- best history essay
__________________________________________

Where? Among guys at your high school?

And people think law firms are wasteful!

63 is right.

Once you have the title, those book-length dissertations pretty much write themselves.

The most overpaid academic? The answer has to be Sunstein. Whatever HLS paid to get him is way too much for the drivel he turns out. (Has a hot wife though.)

I did law school and a PhD, both at T10 schools. The PhD was challenging and interesting. Law school was utter boredom, with only the occasional intellectual nugget, but chock-filled with students and professors who were convinced that they were utterly, utterly brilliant.

The answer is Joe Biden. Even though he's an adjunct faculty, he's not even teaching! Instead, he's got some absurd notion of running for some political office.

To me, the real question is: what is up with all these professional students that have great credentials (I'm talking about you 68), but they can't even make the right decision between grad school and law school and wind up having to do both?

Summary: Doing both grad school and law school is TTT and an indication that you shouldn't have been accepted at either.

I did law school and a PhD, both at T10 schools. The PhD was challenging and interesting. Law school was utter boredom, with only the occasional intellectual nugget, but chock-filled with students and professors who were convinced that they were utterly, utterly brilliant.
__________________________________________

Utterly unsurprising. The sameness and poor quality of the thinking on this board reflects how rote and intellectually empty the study of law is. The fact that their highest "intellectual" aspiration is investment banking or hedge fund management tells you everything you need to know about the capacity of the population at most law schools and law firms. It has become the profession for mouth-breathers with parents who can afford Kaplan LSAT prep, and measure the value of everything in currency.

I am 18, checking back in.

All I was trying to say, which I am 100% sure is correct, is that Top-25ish schools not located in traditional academia "hot spots" -- Massachusetts, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles -- oftentimes pay large sums (comparatively speaking) to professors to relocate to Champaign-Urbana, Iowa City, Minnesota, etc . . .

They HAVE to. How many well-published Yale JD's do you think are hanging around Champaign-Urbana without professor jobs?

70: Far preferable to go to law school and channel yourself into a linear profession at the age of 22. You're right.

Law professors might be worth that much money if they actually taught students how to be effective practitioners. But, with the exceptions of clinical and writing professors, they do not.

73, 70 here: Nice false choice. Of course, the third option is to wait. You don't mention that one.

It is far better to not waste over $100,000 of tuition (not to mention lost incom) on an education you won't really use. If you aren't sure about grad school or law school, by all means wait and figure it out.

It's stupid to blindly compare PhD's vs. JD's without asking what kind of PhD's we're talking about. I'm willing to bet that even an average theoretical physicist is smarter than almost all JD's (and probably smarter than most law profs), while an American Studies PhD (or Comp. Lit, or Sociology, or... you get the point) is automatically suspect.

TITCR

Arthur Miller, NYU (poached from Harvard in 2007).

PhD's & JD's are for little boys. Real men get Microsoft certified and tough it out driving a mid-90s Saturn home every night to a doughy live-in girlfriend in a new-fab apartment complex next to a Kohl's.

76, it's even stupider to talk about intelligence as if it somehow matters at all to how much PhDs or JDs are paid relative to one another.

At my T6 school, there are many students who either (a) have PhDs from top schools or (b) were in PhD programs but switched over to law school. They were not the brightest in the pack. Not even close. It isn't a close call. Law school has the LSAT as a filter and requires 99th percentile (median/mean) in the top schools. While PhD programs admittedly don't put as much weight on GREs, if you look at those GRE scores at top PhD programs, they are not as high as the standardized scores at top law schools. Why couldn't those "brilliant" people score better? Also, PhDs in physics programs may be great with numbers but little else. They are hardly comparable.

All of you talking about "brilliance" are really side-stepping the issue, which is the value-added of a professor, which may be correlated with "brilliance" (proxied, I suppose, by scholarly productivity, which is itself proxied by # of cites) but is not necessarily a one-to-one fit. Two extremes are worth their money: (1) brilliant professor who is often cited and attracts top students and other academic talent and donors, and (2) the Google professor, exemplified by Brian Leiter, who, whatever he gets paid, is worth every penny no matter how ignored he is by real jurisprudes. Why? Because the man is a marketing genius-gimmick that will artifically inflate Chicago's rep for years to come, and attract donations, etc.

I have a PhD and a JD, both from "elite" schools. I'd like to thank the ATL readership for informing me that this is intellectually suspect and a sign of some failure of character and/or intelligence.

Now that I have that defensive opening statement off my chest, I'll add that in my experience law school is many times more challenging than a Ph.D. Sure, to do a Ph.D. you have to muster some self-discipline about setting and meeting deadlines, whereas at law school they are imposed on you and you ignore them at your peril. OTOH, the "originality" required to do Ph.D. research is much less than most people outside the academy realize. Most fields (except maybe the frontiers of some scientific disciplines) are so well-trodden that "originality" often becomes code for "I found something so obscure to write about that I can claim this small piece of intellectual turf as my own." In addition, while the academic job market is competitive in ways the legal job market is not, even for graduates of top programs, nothing in grad school is comparable to the realities of the 1L curve at a top law school. And the sheer numbers of law students mean that the distinctions between law students' academic performance, while sometimes unnecessarily fetishized, do force you to confront your own performance relative to others' in a way dissertation research and writing never does.

Are some law students unimaginative careerist tools? Sure. And you think many grad students are any different? I went to grad school with some people no less narrow, intellectually cautious and prestige-obsessed than the most toolish law student. The only real difference is that grad students use metrics other than money -- peer-reviewed publications, grant money, etc. etc.

I'm glad I have both degrees, and I'm also glad I did the J.D. second, because I find law much more challenging and rewarding than academia. The mystique of the intellectual superiority of the Ph.D. is just that.

83: absolute pwnage. I'm glad that someone finally articulated my viewpoint so wonderfully.

83: I agree with you on several of your points, though I think comparing Ph.D. programs and J.D. programs is akin to comparing apples and oranges. I did a joint history/law program and found quite a bit more short-term accountability in the law, but I don't think that necessarily means that a J.D. is more academically rigorous on the whole, it just means it's more stressful. It's a uniform education in which the only way you're assessed is in direct competition to your peers. You're right - there's no such animal in doctoral programs, but I don't think that necessarily makes doctoral programs repositories for slackers. Sure, "originality" is finding something relatively untrodden to write about, but doing that in a way that a panel of scholars finds compelling is pretty tough - you have to travel to do your research (at least I did), you have to, sometimes, master another language, you have to have exhaustive knowledge of secondary and primary sources, and you have to say something new enough to make you attractive to history departments to get them to hire you. Any doctoral candidate can do a workmanlike job on his or her dissertation, but it requires major commitment to do an excellent job. Doing an excellent job on a law school exam requires working your ass off for three months and coming out at the top of the curve. Some people can do the former, some can do the latter, but I don't see the former as necessarily less challenging than the former simply because it doesn't involve a curve.

My entirely subjective observations: my law school classmates were quicker, had excellent memories and far more stamina and immediate attention to detail; my classmates from the doctoral program were more intellectually curious, well-read, and were far better writers. I wouldn't categorize either set of students as more inherently intelligent than the other.

#81 - Have you considered that people who switch from PhD's to JD's might not be a representative sample and certainly do not reflect the people who become professors? Have you considered that these career changers are often older than the typical law student and might have other priorities and commitments than besting their fellow students? Have you considered that the two fields demand different kinds of skills?

Truly intelligent people would perhaps have figured out how to make big bucks in easier ways than going to law school...

37 & 56: I hope it's not. I would cry. I hope it's Coates, though. If he moves to New Haven, I'm sure the difference in cost of living would enable him to get a third nanny, thereby bringing the ratio of Coates-child to nanny up to 1:1--where it ought to be.

I'm with you on the apples and oranges idea. HLS classes have over 550 students, meaning they accept even more. Many PhD programs admit only 2-6 students per year.

While I had to cram for the LSATs to get accepted at HLS, I would not say it was any easier than my boyfriend's application to PhD programs. His profile was every bit as impressive as mine - but it all came down to luck (was he a good "fit" with a prof, was the right prof taking on students this year) and was a much harder process. He ended up getting a lot more rejection letters than I did, including from TTTs, then accepted to one of the best programs in the field.