Ten Highest Paid University of California Law Faculty

Via Law Blog Emperor Caron, I learn that a San Francisco paper has made available rather striking salary data on the highest paid University of California employees during the 2004-05 academic year.  The listing is based on "total pay" for that academic year, which includes not only salary, but also "overtime, bonuses, housing allowances, relocation allowances, administrative stipends, revenue sharing and more than a dozen other types of cash compensation."  It did not include benefits.  "Total pay" tended to be noticeably higher for those recruited to the UC system recently; long-time faculty are presumably not getting the same kinds of housing allowances and the like.  Note that he data also does not indicate the extent to which these "total pay" figures are stable or once-off or of fixed duration.

The ten highest paid law faculty, in terms of "total pay" during 2004-05, were (small differences [e.g., one or two thousand dollars] were treated as ties):

1.  Michael Schill (Dean, UCLA)

2.  Neil Netanel (UCLA)

3.  Mark Grady (UCLA)

4.  Daniel Farber (Berkeley)

5.  Katherine van Wezel Stone (UCLA)

6.  Christopher Edley (Dean, Berkeley)

7.  Daniel Rubinfeld (Berkeley)

8.  Robert Cooter (Berkeley)

8.  Melvin Eisenberg (Berkeley)

8.  Rachel Moran (Berkeley)

Netanel, Grady, and Stone were all very recent recruits to UCLA; Farber is a relatively recent recruit to Berkeley.

In terms of 2004-05 salaries, if we exclude the two Deans who made the list (Christopher Edley at Berkeley, who earned $280,000, and Michael Schill at UCLA who earned $266,000), here are the ten law professors with the highest salaries in the UC system (rounded to the nearest thousand):

1.  Mark Grady (UCLA) (225)

2.  Stephen Yeazell (UCLA) (220)

3.  Richard Abel (UCLA) (215)

3.  Joel Handler (UCLA) (215)

5.  Grant Nelson (UCLA) (210)

6.  Robert Hillman (UC Davis) (208)

7.  Melvin Eisenberg (Berkeley) (201)

7.  Daniel Rubinfeld (Berkeley) (201)

9.  Jesse Choper (Berkeley) (198)

9.  Daniel Farber (Berkeley) (198)

Knowing something about salaries at Texas, and at Virginia (where the data is also public), I must say that I was surprised that salaries were not generally higher at Berkeley and UCLA.  Perhaps some of the surprising disparities in compensation, especially at UCLA, were known previously; but if not, I also imagine the publication of this data will be sending a lot of folks to the Dean's office!

UPDATE:  Rosa Brooks (Virginia) is surely right about the likely political ramifications of publishing this data.