Legal Commentary

On occasion, I have had conversations with colleagues about the idea of law professors seeking outside grant funding. Of course, we prawfs should all be aware of,  and extremely grateful for, the fact that, unlike many of our peers in other corners of the campus, we are supported by "hard money," i.e., fixed salaries, because our positions are primarily funded by student tuition. I do have some colleagues who (usually working with other profs in other disciplines) have brought in substantial government and/or private grants, which provide huge benefits to the university in terms of the "indirect costs" that the university receives when the government or foundation funds a research project. But I don't get the sense, even for those folks, that these grants are significant, in comparison to their salaries, in providing their overall compensation (unlike in other fields, especially the hard sciences, where grants may in fact provide significant salary support for the faculty member).

In principle, I think it is probably not a bad idea for law prawfs to consider more often whether some of their work might attract outside funding. Not only do grants help support the university financially, thereby perhaps also increasing the value of the law school within it, but applying for grants may in some cases encourage prawfs to think more practically about the potential real-world impact of their work and to try to bring their research to bear more directly on real-world problems.

At the same time, if seeking substantial outside funding became the norm in law schools, including garnering substantial supplemental income from those grants, I wonder how it would change the culture in law schools. If we were no longer primarily dependent on students for our salaries, and instead were focused on bringing in outside funding, would our attitude toward our students change? My husband, recalling his days as an engineering student and then a medical student, is often amazed by the amount of time I spend meeting with students, participating in student events, etc. - and I don't think I spend an unusual amount of time doing those things, by law school standards. But in hard science fields, where (some? many?) faculty salaries and, indeed, faculty members' value to the institution depends in large part on their ability to attract outside grant funding, one might get the message that interacting with students is not the highest priority. So, it seems to me that we ought to consider that the dependence on tuition funds may in some ways be a positive, and not just a negative, for law schools' culture and educational missions.