A note on the economic sociology of law faculties

Here’s a story in Above the Law about the University of Colorado’s rehiring of Lolita Buckner Inniss as dean of its law school. Despite my own highly personal interest in this matter, I’m at this point much more interested in something that has almost nothing to do with me, or more precisely that’s only 1.45% about me:

At the same time, the school is hiring like mad, pushing its faculty-student ratio down to Yale & Stanford levels without finding a way to bring in Yale & Stanford levels of money.

[Quoting LGM] The financial situation is so bad that, despite the enormous subsidy, equal to 104% of its self-generated revenues, the law school gets from central campus — this in practice means from all those “useless” humanities and social science departments, many of which haven’t been allowed to make a new full-time hire in years (the law school made eight in 2025) — the law school was unable to pay faculty and staff raises out of its regular budget this spring, and had to raid gift funds in order to do so. Regental and university rules don’t allow us not to pay the regent-approved raises, so as soon as we can no longer raid this particular piggy bank we’ll have to start laying people off, probably next year, or at the latest the year after that.

It’s not entirely clear how the university expects to attract and retain talent while explicitly broadcasting that dissenting voices might as well pack up their desks in advance. But maybe that’s the point. If the school finds itself on the brink of layoffs, it might behoove them to push people out the door.

This imputes a level of theoretical rationality to events that they almost certainly don’t manifest in practice.

A few days after I pointed out that the law school is broke, and that there’s no plan for coming up with the money to pay future raises, even though we don’t have the money in our regular budget for current raises (good luck trying to explain to Carmela Soprano the average law school faculty member that existing continuing expenditures are things that you’ll have to pay again next year, too, along with the new continuing expenditures) we got an email from the chair of the appointments committee. She announced that the law school was anticipating authorization from the provost to hire between one and three more tenure track professors, along with a director for one of the clinics, and another Legal Research & Writing professor. I have no idea how realistic this anticipation is, given that the brand new provost is inheriting a mess she had no role in authorizing in the first place, and she was a professor of economics in her pre-administrative incarnation. (The law school faculty is 53% larger now than it was in the late 1990s, while the student body is around 10% larger).

This missive triggered the realization that, in my 35 years on the faculty, we have never to the best of my recollection ever had a discussion about how large the law faculty should be. I do remember a couple of times that somebody or the other mentioned that we ought to have such a discussion, but the subject has never gotten past that meta-level of inquiry as far as I can remember.

The reason for that seems obvious: The law faculty’s answer to the question of how large the faculty should be is, absent external controls or pressures of some sort, the same as its answer to the question of how large our salaries should be, which is to say “as large as possible.” Indeed these two questions are to a significant extent the same question, since a larger faculty is a kind of indirect form of remuneration, since it means smaller classes and teaching loads, more freedom in regard to which classes a particular faculty member can choose to teach, more research leaves, etc.

So yeah, the answer is always “more,” especially since it is of course the easiest thing in the world to come up with many very public spirited sounding explanations for why a bigger faculty is better for our students, the legal community, the state of Colorado, America, and the international and intergalactic legal order. This is always amusingly evident during discussions of “curricular need,” in which every single faculty member’s particular academic speciality is both

(a) Critical to the practice of law, the maintenance of the legal order in general, and so forth; and

(b) Capable of being subdivided into an essentially infinite number of sub-topics and specializations.

I assume that (b) at least is true throughout academia as a whole, as is the toddleresque tendency to conclude, absent adult supervision, that yes I would like another cookie right now, ceteris paribus, especially if it has a double frosted filling and maybe some multi-colored sprinkles too, because more cookies are better than fewer, especially since we deserve those cookies more than the people who aren’t getting them over in Sociology and Economics and English and History and Political Science because [I have written the solution to this mystery in the margin].