<p>
</p>
<p>I think the (median) law profs have it pretty good. The median law prof is tenured, which means that he can never be fired, except in highly specific circumstances (i.e. he gets caught stealing money from the school or you never show up to the classes you are supposed to teach). Think about that. You basically have a job and a guaranteed income stream for life. You don’t have to constantly worry about landing and maintaining clientele, you don’t have to worry about economic recessions, you don’t even have to worry about winning your cases. Basically, you no longer have to work hard or produce quality work. You can teach your classes poorly, you can do write legal research papers of poor quality (or write none at all), and it doesn’t matter. You’ve locked in an annuity for the rest of your life. </p>
<p>Now, granted, most tenured law profs won’t let their quality of their work degrade, if nothing else, then for their own professional pride. They still care about teaching a good class. They still care about producing quality research. </p>
<p>But they have the security of knowing that they don’t have to care. They know they can let their quality slip and they’ll still have a job. Yeah, they may lose professional status within the academic community. But they’ll still have a job. They can’t be fired. </p>
<p>There’s a huge difference between working hard because you want to impress your colleagues and working hard because you’ll be fired if you don’t. It comes down to doing something because you want to do it, and doing something because you have to do it. </p>
<p>Besides, I would also point to the very high quality of life within tenured academia: certainly far more so than in BIGLAW. Academia is highly flexible and family-friendly. You are generally required to be on campus only maybe half of the day (whenever you are teaching and in administrative meetings + seminars). Your summers are off. You get long holiday breaks. Now, to be sure, a lot of tenured faculty will continue to come to the office anyway. But that’s by choice. They don’t have to be there. They have control over their time that most in BIGLAW can only dream of having.</p>