Thread by @OrinKerr

Notable opinions on the legality of having academic salaries depend heavily on responses to lateral offers (so-called "retention raises.")

Quick thread.

cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opin… #N

My sense is that it's not uncommon, at U.S. universities, for faculty salaries to be determined less by a professor's perceived excellence or prominence than on whether a big raise was once considered needed to keep that prof when a competitor school came along.

The two will be correlated, in that on average you would expect competitors to try to hire a school's best profs. But there's a lot of noise in that signal, ranging from profs who turn down outside inquiries to those who may pursue them mostly to get retention raises.

Among the legal questions that raises, discussed in the opinion, is whether that leads to a prima facie case of disparate impact under Title VII.

I don't know anything about this area of law, so I can't comment on the legal questions, but it seemed like an important issue worth flagging. I hope others who follow this subject will lend their expertise to explaining the case and its significance. /end

From Judge VanDyke's partial concurrence and partial dissent :