The Legal Scholarship Blog notes an interesting American Bar Foundation study: After Tenure: Post-Tenure Law Professors in the United States.
The After Tenure Study, jointly funded by the ABF and LSAC, is the first in-depth examination of the lives of post-tenure law professors in the United States. It combines a national survey of post-tenure law professors in the U.S. (undertaken in 2005-2006) with a set of follow-up interviews (conducted with a subset of the survey respondents in 2007-2008). A total of 1175 professors responded to the initial survey; their responses provide the basis of this Project Report, which contains descriptive statistics from our first quantitative analyses. Future reports and articles will provide further quantitative and qualitative results.
The study includes interesting data on post-tenure salaries:
The median range of incomes varied depending on number of years of experience as well as on factors pertaining to the particular law schools at which professors taught. Professors with a greater number of years of work experience earned a higher income than did those with fewer years of experience. At the time of the AT survey, those professors who had received tenure between 1966 and 1975 were earning, on average, between $150,000 and $174,999 while those who had received tenure between 1976 and 1995 were earning between $125,000 and $149,999. Respondents who received tenure more recently (that is, after 1996), on average, were earning between $100,000 and $124,999.
(From page 26). I realize the difficulty in conducting survey-based research, but the data reported is six years old, before the economic downturn. Iwonder if the data, especially the income data, has remained constant.
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