How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? University of Texas Edition

They say everything is bigger in Texas. Is that true of law professor salaries?

A commenter on our story from last month about salaries for Boalt Hall law professors requested data about faculty compensation at UC Hastings. Ask and you shall receive. As noted over at TaxProf Blog (via the ABA Journal), the median salary for an assistant professor at Hastings is $112,942 and the median salary for a tenured professor at Hastings is $187,221 (not counting summer stipends).

Let’s continue our law professor salary survey. Last week, we looked at the University of Michigan (#9 in the latest U.S. News rankings, and #12 in the inaugural Above the Law rankings). Now we turn to the University of Texas (#15 in U.S. News, and T14 to ATL).

They say that everything is bigger in Texas. Is that true of law school faculty salaries?

You can access salary information for Texas state employees, including but not limited to UT faculty members, through the Texas Tribune. Most of the salaries are listed as of February 6, 2012. We took this list of professors and assistant professors at UT Law, looked up the names in the database, and prepared this handy spreadsheet showing faculty compensation. (We did this manually, so as always, please alert us to any errors.)

Regarding Texas, here are some highlights:

  • The sum of the listed salaries is $15,716,718.
  • The average salary on the list is $209,556. This is nominally lower than the Michigan figure of $243,177 and the Berkeley figure of $235,482, but don’t forget all of the caveats about ensuring that faculty salary comparisons are truly apples-to-apples.
  • Also, don’t forget that Texas has no state income tax and a generally reasonable cost of living (as our Texas readers love to remind us.)
  • The lowest faculty salary was $125,296, for Professor John Deigh (although note that he has a joint appointment; he’s both a law professor and a professor in the philosophy department).
  • The highest faculty salary was $613,612, for William C. Powers Jr. — but he’s the president of the entire university, who just happens to have an appointment at the law school..
  • We don’t know how much the dean makes. The former dean, Lawrence Sager — who was reportedly forced out, possibly due to controversies over professorial pay — makes $270,018 as a professor. The incoming dean, Ward Farnsworth, is not yet listed in the database.

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Here are the ten highest-paid professors at UT Law:

1. William C. Powers Jr. (president) – $613,612
2. Stefanie A. Lindquist – $329,318
3. Gregory J. Vincent – $280,719
4. William M. Sage – $270,954
5. Lawrence Sager – $270,018
6. Robert G. Bone – $261,457
7. Matthew L. Spitzer – $260,050
8. Ronen Avraham – $256,269
9. Jay L. Westbrook – $251,552
10. Thomas O. McGarity – $251,138

One of the claims made in the compensation controversy involving former Dean Sager was that there was a gender pay gap at UT Law. Of the ten top earners listed above, just one, Stefanie Lindquist, is a woman. But male domination of top-ten-earner lists is par for the course — see, e.g., Michigan (two women) and Berkeley (one woman).

Another allegation was that Dean Sager doled out overly generous pay packages to lure stars from other schools to UT. Here is the list of ten top earners with the year of each one’s arrival at Texas listed parenthetically:

1. William C. Powers Jr. (1978)
2. Stefanie A. Lindquist (2008)
3. Gregory J. Vincent (2005)
4. William M. Sage (2006)
5. Lawrence Sager (2002)
6. Robert G. Bone (2010)
7. Matthew L. Spitzer (2010)
8. Ronen Avraham (2008)
9. Jay L. Westbrook (1980)
10. Thomas O. McGarity (1980)

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Lawrence Sager served as dean from 2006 to 2011, so almost half of the top earners — three out of eight (excluding President Powers and Dean Sager himself) — joined UT Law during his deanship. But should it be surprising that people must be paid more when being lured to a new institution? You see this in other contexts as well, such as lateral partner hiring at law firms. As our in-house columnist Mark Herrmann recently observed, you often get the most love when you walk in the door.

Law professors at top schools like Texas certainly get plenty of love. How does professorial pay change as one goes down the law school hierarchy? We’ll find out in future installments of our law professor pay watch.

Law Faculty Salaries, 2012-13 [TaxProf Blog]
Which law schools pay tenured profs the most and least? [ABA Journal]
Texas Law Faculty Salaries [Above the Law via Google Docs]
Professors and Assistant Professors of Law [University of Texas School of Law]
Salaries at The University of Texas School of Law [Texas Tribune]

Earlier: How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? Michigan Law Edition
How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? UVA Law Edition
How Much Does Your Law Professor Make? Berkeley Law Edition