Abstract
<p>This article critiques the legal academy’s practice of privileging scholarship over teaching and service in faculty evaluation and compensation systems. While recognizing scholarship as an important component of a law professor’s responsibilities, the article argues that law schools disproportionately reward scholarly production through merit pay, summer research funding, reduced teaching loads, research support, and compensation structures that assign decisive weight to publication. Drawing on scholarship concerning legal education, faculty compensation, gender equity, and academic governance, the article examines the consequences of this hierarchy. It contends that privileging scholarship contributes to persistent gender-based pay disparities because teaching, advising, and service work, disproportionately performed by women and faculty of color, are systematically undervalued relative to research output. The article further argues that the growing emphasis on demonstrated scholarship creates barriers to entry into legal academia by privileging candidates with the resources to pursue fellowships, visiting academic positions, or advanced degrees that facilitate publication. It also maintains that incentives favoring scholarship can divert faculty time and institutional resources away from teaching and student learning, including formative assessment and individualized feedback. The article then considers common justifications for the prevailing system, including the perceived ease of measuring scholarly productivity and the influence of U.S. News law school rankings, and concludes that neither sufficiently justifies the resulting inequities. As a reform measure, the article proposes amending ABA Standard 509 to require law schools to disclose the compensation metrics used to evaluate faculty performance, including the relative weight assigned to scholarship, teaching, and service. Increased transparency, the article argues, would provide prospective students with meaningful information about institutional priorities and encourage greater accountability in faculty compensation practices.[This abstract was written by Microsoft Copilot, a generative artificial intelligence.]</p>