Pre- Law reports
Paul Campos, the long-time professor at the University of Colorado Law School, is suing the law school, alleging it is discriminating against him because he is Latino. Campos is best known for a series of articles in The Atlantic and other publications that were critical of legal education in the years after the Great Recession. This included an anonymous blog that he wrote from 2011 to 2015 called Inside the Law School Scam, in which he was critical of legal education and the workload of law professors.
He wrote on his own blog that he “received a very low annual evaluation grade — one that put me in the bottom 2% of the faculty historically.” He said he had an outstanding year in both publishing and service.
Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, was a critic of Campos when he published his blog and shortly thereafter. He recently wrote on his own blog that Campo’s publishing has been weak. Instead of legal scholarship, he wrote an article and a book on obesity, and on the experience of being a sports fan.
“According to Google Scholar, more than half his citations during this period derived from his 2004 book on obesity and a co-authored five-page article in an epidemiology journal from 2006, also on obesity.” Leiter wrote. “Most of the rest of the citations were due to an essay pasting together stuff from his notorious scam blog, and a notoriously incompetent op-ed in the New York Times about the cost of higher education. It is not hard to see why a committee evaluating faculty for their scholarly accomplishment might take a dim view of all of this.”
Leiter also said Campos’ legal arguments are weak.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of law professors who have a favorable impression of him,” Leiter said of Campos. “The general view is he’s kind of opportunistic. He likes to be in the limelight, he likes to be in the newspapers, he likes to attract attention to himself.”
Campos started working for University of Colorado in 1990. According to his lawsuit, a 2021 pay study by the university found that he earned nearly $14,000 less per year than white law faculty. Campos is the most senior law faculty member without an endowed professorship, his suit claims.
