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Law professors

Official title Law Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1112)

Also called Law faculty, Law school professor, Law teacher, Law lecturer, Law school faculty

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 20,060 US law professors, with median pay of $128,500 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 22,800, in May 2024. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 1,200 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for law professors: Learning management systems + video lecture, 2007 to 2022.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 2.6% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Law professors: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1112

Chicago

Future History. "Law professors: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1112.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_25_1112, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Law professors: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1112}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1775180018251850187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Law Lecturer / Proprietary Law Instructor (Litchfield era)
Known then as Professor of Law (university-affiliated, pre-case-method)
Known then as Professor of Law (case method era, Harvard-model expansion)
Known then as Professor of Law / Law School Faculty (ABA accreditation era)
Known then as Law Professor / Clinical Law Professor (clinical education era)
Known then as Law Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1112)
Known today as Law Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1112)
Projected to still be called Law Teachers, Postsecondary (BLS SOC 25-1112)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
20K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$128,500
Est.

≈ $125,206 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1774

Tapping Reeve begins accepting law students into his Litchfield, Connecticut home -- marking the start of the first dedicated law school in the United States. In 1784, Reeve builds a one-room schoolhouse adjacent to his house to accommodate growing demand. The school operates from 1774 to 1833, training over 1,100 lawyers including Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun. James Gould joins as co-instructor in 1798 and carries the school after Reeve's retirement in 1820. The law teacher at Litchfield is a full-time professional educator -- the first in American legal history.

Beat · 1817

Harvard opens its law school, with the first chaired professorship in law established a year earlier in 1816. Harvard is widely credited as the first university-affiliated law school in the United States. The founding marks the transition from proprietary schools (Litchfield model) to university law faculties as the primary locus of legal education.

Beat · 1870

Harvard president Charles Eliot appoints Christopher Columbus Langdell as professor and dean of Harvard Law School. Langdell invents the case method -- having students read original court opinions and then defending their analysis under Socratic questioning in class. He publishes the first casebook (A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts) in 1871. Langdell's graduates carry the method to law schools across the country; by 1900 it is standard at accredited institutions.

Beat · 1900

The Association of American Law Schools is founded with 32 of the 108 then-existing law schools as charter members. From its founding, AALS promotes the case method and university affiliation as standards for legal education. The ABA will begin its formal accreditation program in 1923. The formation of these two organizations begins the long process of professionalizing legal education -- and the law teaching role -- through accreditation standards, curriculum requirements, and faculty qualification norms.

Beat · 1968

The Ford Foundation launches the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR) with $12 million in grants to support clinical legal education programs at law schools. CLEPR funding catalyzes the clinical movement: law schools build clinics where students represent real clients under faculty supervision. This creates the clinical law professor as a distinct faculty type -- one whose teaching tools are the courtroom and client office, not the casebook.

Beat · 1972

The 1972-73 to 1980-81 period begins an eight-year stretch during which average faculty salary increases consistently lag the rate of inflation. Law professors gain in nominal terms but lose real purchasing power -- a squeeze that forces a reckoning with the opportunity cost of academia versus practice. The period coincides with a large enrollment boom: LSAC test takers reached 133,300 in 1975, and law school enrollments grew by 234% from 1960 to 1980, creating strong demand for new faculty even as real wages declined.

Beat · 2010

First-year law school enrollment peaks at approximately 52,000 students -- the high-water mark for post-war legal education. The Great Recession (2008-2009) initially delayed the contraction by reducing entry-level employment alternatives, but 2010 marks the turning point. Enrollment will fall to approximately 37,000 first-year students by 2014 -- a 29% decline in four years -- as the "scam blog" era and BLS data on declining entry-level associate salaries divert prospective students. Law faculties, which had expanded with enrollment, begin sustained contraction that continues through 2022.

Beat · 2022

ABA-accredited law schools report 9,342 full-time faculty in 2022, down from 10,026 in 2017, a loss of about 7% in five years. That count covers full-time faculty at accredited law schools only; the OEWS series plotted here counts all wage-and-salary law teachers, part-time included.

Beat · 2024

The ABA Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence publishes its Year 2 Report, finding that AI has moved from experiment to infrastructure in legal education: 55% of surveyed law schools now offer dedicated AI and law courses, and employer expectations for AI-competent graduates are reshaping curriculum priorities. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024) had established a formal duty-of-competence obligation for practicing lawyers using generative AI -- a standard that law schools must now teach. Harvey's Law School Alliance Program launches in August 2025 at 40+ partner schools. Law professors now navigate an occupational landscape where their core craft (Socratic teaching, clinical supervision, scholarship) is structurally durable, but everything adjacent to it is being rapidly reshaped.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace law professors? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+2.6%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 25-1112 (Law teachers, postsecondary): 25.8 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 26.5 thousand in 2035, a change of +0.7 thousand (+2.6%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.3% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
58.8%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 25-1112.00 Law Teachers, Postsecondary. Shown: human-rated β = 0.588, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.425 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.75; GPT-4-rated β 0.45. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for law professors

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereRedesign first-year legal research syllabi and skills-course instruction around AI research workflows, incorporating Lexis+ Protégé and CoCounsel Deep Research as primary research tools, teaching students to critically evaluate AI-generated case summaries and citation lists against Shepard's verification, and building hallucination-detection habits into every research assignment

Redesign first-year legal research syllabi and skills-course instruction around AI research workflows, incorporating Lexis+ Protégé and CoCounsel Deep Research as primary research tools, teaching students to critically evaluate AI-generated case summaries and citation lists against Shepard's verification, and building hallucination-detection habits into every research assignment; update course materials each semester as AI tool capabilities change to ensure students are prepared for actual law firm research workflows.[13],[9],[14]

Where your edge is

Ground your legal research teaching in the Magesh JELS 2025 hallucination-rate data (Lexis+ AI ~17%, Westlaw AI ~33%): it gives students a concrete, empirically grounded framework for skepticism that is more actionable than vague warnings about "AI limitations." Build verification drills into every exercise: students don't just run the research query, they document which AI citations were validated by Shepard's and which were hallucinated. This builds professional habit, not just AI awareness.

AI is sitting alongside you hereDesign law school examinations (generating AI-assisted hypothetical fact patterns and issue-spotter questions [using ChatGPT Edu or Claude to draft scenarios, then validating doctrinal accuracy and testing all intended issues], administering exams through ExamSoft in proctored settings or with explicit course AI-use policies for take-home formats, and grading written exams by applying rubrics that distinguish doctrinal accuracy, analytical structure, and policy reasoning) the dimensions that matter for bar passage that AI-scoring cannot reliably evaluate.

Design law school examinations (generating AI-assisted hypothetical fact patterns and issue-spotter questions [using ChatGPT Edu or Claude to draft scenarios, then validating doctrinal accuracy and testing all intended issues], administering exams through ExamSoft in proctored settings or with explicit course AI-use policies for take-home formats, and grading written exams by applying rubrics that distinguish doctrinal accuracy, analytical structure, and policy reasoning) the dimensions that matter for bar passage that AI-scoring cannot reliably evaluate.[15],[16],[17]

Where your edge is

Use AI to front-load exam design: ChatGPT Edu can generate several hypothetical fact-pattern variations for a Torts issue-spotter in minutes, you select, refine, and validate the one that hits the exact doctrinal targets you need. This turns a drafting task into a selection-and-refinement task. For grading, apply Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping to multiple-choice and short-answer components; reserve professor time for the essay grading where analytical-reasoning quality is visible and irreducibly requires your doctrinal judgment.

AI is sitting alongside you hereProduce original legal scholarship (law review articles, book chapters, SSRN working papers, and amicus briefs) using AI literature-synthesis tools (Lexis+ Protégé for case-law surveys, NotebookLM for source organization, CoCounsel Deep Research for multi-jurisdictional statutory surveys) to accelerate background research, while supplying the original doctrinal argument, normative analysis, and scholarly voice that peer review requires

Produce original legal scholarship (law review articles, book chapters, SSRN working papers, and amicus briefs) using AI literature-synthesis tools (Lexis+ Protégé for case-law surveys, NotebookLM for source organization, CoCounsel Deep Research for multi-jurisdictional statutory surveys) to accelerate background research, while supplying the original doctrinal argument, normative analysis, and scholarly voice that peer review requires; adhere to institutional AI disclosure policies and the emerging norms on AI attribution in legal scholarship.[18],[13],[9]

Where your edge is

Use AI to collapse the literature-survey bottleneck: Lexis+ Protégé and CoCounsel Deep Research can execute multi-step case-law surveys in minutes, freeing time for the actual argument development that determines whether a piece lands in a top-ranked law review. Verify every AI-surfaced citation via Shepard's (Magesh JELS 2025: Lexis+ AI hallucinated 17% of citations). Build a transparent AI-disclosure note into your methodology section: law reviews will require it, and proactive disclosure protects your scholarly credibility.

Where law professors go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Education Administrators, Postsecondary

Tenured law professors regularly pivot to administrative leadership (Associate Dean for Curriculum, Associate Dean for Clinical Programs, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs) applying their deep knowledge of legal education standards (ABA accreditation), faculty governance, and student outcomes to institutional leadership roles. In the AI era, this pivot is particularly timely: law school deans and associate deans are making consequential decisions about which AI tools to adopt, how to revise bar-exam-focused curricula, and how to compete on employer AI-readiness metrics. Faculty with demonstrated AI-pedagogy innovation (Hotshot integration, Harvey curricula) are well-positioned for these roles because they bring credibility with both faculty and students.

What you'd add
  • · ABA accreditation standards and self-study process (ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools)
  • · Budget management and resource allocation in higher education
  • · Strategic planning and institutional program design
  • · Faculty recruitment, promotion, and tenure governance
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of law professors changed since 1774?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Lecture notes, casebooks, and Blackstone's Commentaries (proprietary law school era)

    The law teacher of the Litchfield era and the early university period worked with lectures, handwritten notes, and Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (first American edition 1771-1772) as the primary reference text. Tapping Reeve lectured from prepared notes that students copied; James Gould, who succeeded him, revised and organized those notes into a more systematic course. The technology of the law classroom was essentially pen, paper, and printed English treatises -- tools that structured the profession for nearly a century before Langdell's casebook revolution.

  • Langdell casebook + Socratic method (Harvard case-method revolution)

    When Christopher Columbus Langdell published A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts in 1871 -- the first law school casebook -- he gave law teachers a radically new tool: the primary court opinion organized for pedagogical use, with students expected to read the opinions in advance and then defend their analysis under Socratic questioning in class. The method required the professor to be a skilled oral examiner, not merely a lecturer. It also required publishers and printers to produce casebooks at scale, which the West Publishing Company (founded 1872, began the Federal Reporter in 1880) made commercially viable. From 1900 onward, the AALS promoted casebook-Socratic teaching as the standard for accredited schools, and the method has been the structural core of law teaching ever since.

    Effect on the work

    The case-method era created a distinct professional identity for law teachers separate from practitioners. A law professor was now primarily a pedagogue-scholar who must master both the doctrinal content and the Socratic facilitation craft -- a combination that took years to develop and was not transferable to other teaching formats.

  • Clinical legal education + legal writing programs (skills movement)

    Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the Ford Foundation's Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR) grants program (launched 1968), law schools developed clinical programs where students represented real clients under faculty supervision. This created a new type of law teacher -- the clinical professor -- whose tool was the live law practice environment rather than the casebook. By the mid-1970s, clinical faculty were a recognized, if institutionally contested, part of law school faculties. The parallel growth of legal writing programs as required 1L courses created a third faculty category: legal writing instructors, who taught the mechanics of brief-writing, memo-writing, and statutory analysis. By 1990, a law faculty had typically three distinct teaching roles: doctrinal (casebook-Socratic), clinical (supervised live practice), and skills (legal writing, moot court, negotiation).

    Effect on the work

    Clinical and skills faculty substantially expanded law school faculty headcounts from the 1970s onward. A school that had many doctrinal professors in 1960 might have many total faculty by 1990 once clinical and writing faculty were added. This expansion drove law school cost structures significantly higher.

  • Westlaw + LexisNexis computerized legal research (desktop era)

    Westlaw launched its online database in 1975; LexisNexis followed in 1973. By the early 1990s, both were fixtures in law school computer labs, and legal research instruction pivoted from print reporters and digests to online retrieval. For law teachers, this transformed both how they prepared courses (case-law surveys that once took hours in a physical library took minutes online) and what they were required to teach. First-year legal research courses were redesigned around Boolean search operators and database navigation. The shift also compressed the amount of time research tasks consumed in scholarship preparation, allowing more faculty to publish at higher rates.

  • Learning management systems + video lecture (Blackboard, Canvas, Zoom; pandemic acceleration)

    Learning management systems (Blackboard launched 1997; Canvas growing rapidly from 2011) became the administrative backbone of law school teaching -- housing syllabi, assignments, grades, and discussion boards. The COVID-19 pandemic (spring 2020) forced a sudden universal shift to Zoom for Socratic classroom sessions, revealing both the adaptability of the method (the live call-on dynamic survived video remarkably well) and its limits (reading the room is harder on video; cold-calling feels less collegial than in-person). Many schools retained some hybrid or asynchronous components post-pandemic. Video lecture recording became standard for accessibility and exam review. These tools did not transform the core teaching method but they significantly reshaped how the law professor manages a course from a logistics and content-delivery standpoint.

  • Generative AI in legal research and teaching (Harvey, CoCounsel, Lexis+ Protege, ChatGPT Edu)

    The arrival of production-grade generative AI in legal research -- Harvey (launched 2023, many law school partners by Aug 2025), Thomson Reuters CoCounsel with Deep Research (Aug 2025), LexisNexis Lexis+ Protege (Feb 2026, hundreds of legal workflows) -- has forced a fundamental rethink of what law professors teach and how. The ABA Task Force on Law and AI Year 2 Report (Dec 2025) characterized the shift as AI moving from experiment to infrastructure: 55% of surveyed US law schools now offer dedicated AI courses, law firms hiring graduates expect AI tool fluency from day one, and ABA Formal Opinion 512 (Jul 2024) created an affirmative duty-of-competence obligation for practicing lawyers that law schools must teach to students. For the individual faculty member, the tools are double-edged: they accelerate scholarship literature surveys and grading (Gradescope AI-assisted answer grouping reports 30-50% time reductions at 3,000+ institutions), but they also create new academic integrity challenges and require continuous curriculum updates that earlier cohorts of professors never faced.

    Effect on the work

    The AI era creates asymmetric effects by faculty career stage. Junior faculty who build AI-integrated curricula (Harvey, Hotshot tracks, CoCounsel research exercises) are becoming more competitive in the job market because law schools are evaluated by employers on AI readiness. Senior faculty face a steeper retooling curve. The overall effect on headcount is likely small in the short run; the ABA accreditation requirements (live Socratic instruction, licensed clinical supervision) structurally protect the faculty role from headcount displacement even as individual tasks are augmented.

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Law Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year

On record since1774
Latest US employment20,060 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$128,500 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+2.6% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
19001,200n/aEst., AALS Researched contextReport
19504,000n/aEst., Marquette University Law School Researched contextReport
1956n/a$6,800Est., Higher Ed Data Stories Researched contextReport
19758,500$26,000Est., LawHub (employment) Researched contextEst., AHA Perspectives (pay) Researched contextReport
20009,400$75,190Est., Derived estimate of full-time law… (employment) Researched contextBLS OEWS 2000 (pay) Official statisticReport
200311,470$82,740BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
200412,580$87,290BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
200513,560$89,790BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
200611,870$87,240BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
200712,610$87,730BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
200812,490$93,210BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
200912,690$99,040BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
201014,620$94,260BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
201114,980$93,330BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
201215,260$99,950BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
201315,600$105,080BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
201415,990$109,980BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
201516,430$105,250BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
201616,010$111,210BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
201716,900$104,910BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
201816,990$111,140BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
201916,180$113,530BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
202014,930$116,430BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
202114,110$123,470BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
202214,830$108,860BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
202314,570$127,360BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
202422,800$126,650BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
202520,060$128,500BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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