How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? UCLA Law Edition

The top professors at UCLA Law do very, very well for themselves.

Welcome to the latest installment of Law Professor Pay Watch. After visiting Texas and Michigan, we’re back on the coasts, this time in sunny southern California.

Los Angeles is home to many celebrities — and we’re not just talking about Hollywood stars. The superb faculty of UCLA School of Law boasts several prominent pundits and public intellectuals.

How much do star bloggers like Eugene Volokh and Stephen Bainbridge earn from their day jobs? What about such academic adversaries as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the critical-race queen, and Richard Sander, a leading opponent of affirmative action?

You can access salary information for California state employees, including but not limited to UCLA faculty members, through the Sacramento Bee. The salaries listed are for 2011, which appears to be the most recent year available. We took this list of “Full-Time Faculty” at UCLA Law, looked up the names in the Sac Bee database, and prepared a handy spreadsheet showing faculty compensation. (You can see the full spreadsheet on the next page; we entered the data manually, so as always, please alert us to any errors.)

Regarding UCLA, here are some highlights:

  • The sum of the listed salaries is $18,335,385.
  • The average salary on the list is $226,362. This is generally consistent with prior figures we’ve seen, which range from about $210,000 to $240,000 — but note that the UCLA list of “full-time faculty” includes some non-tenured or non-tenure-track teachers who drag down the average. (And also note all our earlier caveats about making apples-to-apples faculty salary comparisons.)
  • The lowest faculty salary is that of Ilan Meyer ($72,191.67), an expert in public health. He’s a scholar in residence, as opposed to a tenured or tenure-track professor at the law school, which may explain his relatively modest comp.
  • Then there are a half-dozen people earning in the $80K-range: five lecturers — Julie Cramer, Skye Donald, Kerry Grossman, Sarah Korobkin, Jyoti Nanda — and Albert Moore, an emeritus professor who teaches in the clinical program.
  • The highest salary belongs to Dean Rachel Moran, who earned $427,825.01 in 2011. This is within the normal range for deans at top schools. As previously noted, the deans of such peer schools as Michigan, UVA, and Berkeley make between $350,000 and $470,000.

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Here are the ten highest-paid faculty members at UCLA Law:

1. Rachel Moran (dean) – $427,825.01
2. Seana Shiffrin – $369,024.00
3. Kirk J. Stark – $358,346.61
4. Steven A. Bank – $358,183.13
5. Stephen M. Bainbridge – $356,619.39
6. Jennifer L. Mnookin – $348,490.82
7. Kal Raustiala – $344,069.04
8. Sharon Dolovich – $336,199.01
9. Devon W. Carbado – $323,208.49
10. Mark Greenberg – $320,519.51

We’ve remarked in the past on how male professors tend to dominate the top-ten-earner lists. UCLA’s list — featuring four women, including a woman in the top spot — is the most gender-balanced once we’ve seen so far.

Of the names appearing above, Stephen Bainbridge jumps out at me, thanks to his well-known (and excellent) blog. Missing from the top ten is Eugene Volokh, of Volokh Conspiracy fame, but don’t shed tears for him; with 2011 compensation of $258,589.30, he’s doing just fine for himself.

The aforementioned Kimberlé Crenshaw earns just $127,886.07 from UCLA — but she splits her time with Columbia, which must pay her at least that much. As for Richard Sander, he took home $270,202.76 in 2011. In the (unlikely) event that he’s unhappy with how Fisher turns out, he can dry his tears with a silk handkerchief.

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Congratulations to UCLA’s great minds on their great paychecks. They might not earn as much as their movie-star neighbors, but average comp of a quarter-million is nothing to scoff at.

(Flip to the next page to see the full UCLA Law School faculty salary spreadsheet.)