Survey of Law School Faculty, Prospects for Grants & Other Financial Support for Legal Scholarship

Survey of Law School Faculty, Prospects for Grants & Other Financial Support for Legal Scholarship

We asked survey respondents about how they felt about a range of services offered by their law school or their general university related to helping them to find grants and other research support. First, we asked about the knowledge of these department of sources of grants for legal scholars. On average, they rated the office of research and grants at their law school (or their general university office if this is one that they deal with) as poor or fair on their knowledge of sources of grants for legal scholars, with 41.35% not answering the question, 16.35% rating it as poor, 17.31% rating it as fair, 10.58% rating it as acceptable, 9.62% rating it as good, and 4.81% rating it as excellent. However, there were significant variations depending on the characteristics of the respondents and their institutions.

This study presents data on the value of grants and other financial support received by legal scholars over the past five years, and breaks down support from the Federal government, the private sector, law schools and all other sources.  The study also quantifies the number of grants applied for, the percentage of work time spent on pursuit of funding, and the extent of faculty use of law school, university and law and general university library resources designed to assist in grant procurement.

In addition, survey respondents opine on the current state of legal research funding, and prospects for the future.   Although legal scholars depend less on grants than their counterparts in STEM subject areas, they nonetheless enjoy significant levels of research funding from a broad array of sources. Data in the report is broken out by the personal characteristics of the respondents, such as their age, work title, teaching load and gender, as well as the institutional characteristics of the law schools that employ them, such as their ranking, size and public or private status – enabling more precise benchmarking.