A paltry 27 percent of eligible faculty favored reappointing Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss. Meanwhile, some 90 percent of student group leaders solicited for their thoughts also objected to her keeping the job. In response, the University of Colorado Law School decided… to reappoint the dean.
At this point, Colorado Law might just be trolling its faculty and students for kicks.
More faculty explicitly voted against granting the dean another run at the post — roughly 38 percent — while a handful formally abstained and a quarter just refused to vote one way or the other. The ABA actually has a rule against appointing deans “over the stated objection of a substantial majority of the faculty” without good cause. The school hasn’t gone into that. But Trump wants to eliminate the ABA’s status as the official law school accreditor — presumably so he can set up Trump University College of Law if he ever leaves office. Maybe the school feels it can get in the administration’s good graces by breaching the ABA’s accreditation rules first!
The reappointment confounds on a lot of levels. Back in 2023, Colorado professor Paul Campos sued the school for discrimination after a curiously low evaluation that no one would explain. The school settled in 2024 because the dean responded to the suit by removing Campos from a key committee assignment, leaving a paper trail of retaliation that was as much “bad litigation strategy” as Labor & Employment final exam hypo. Since retaliating against employees rarely works out unless you have six justices on speed dial — the school covered all of Campos’s legal fees and gave him a chunk of money to end the case.
As Campos himself said of the reappointment in comments to the local news, “If you essentially have your institution admit you’ve been found liable for violating the civil rights of one of your tenured faculty members, and not only did (the university) settle (the lawsuit) for a significant amount of money but you get removed as that person’s immediate supervisor … it’s kind of amazing someone would get reappointed under those circumstances.”
Hey, they reappointed Alina Habba and there are explicit statutes against that, so anything’s possible in 2025.
But as Campos explains in a post over at Lawyers, Guns, Money, it’s not just a matter of his personal legal issues with the dean’s tenure. While the dean claimed that diversity is her primary goal, faculty pointed to the school losing multiple non-white scholars under her leadership. At the same time, the school is hiring like mad, pushing its faculty-student ratio down to Yale & Stanford levels without finding a way to bring in Yale & Stanford levels of money.
The financial situation is so bad that, despite the enormous subsidy, equal to 104% of its self-generated revenues, the law school gets from central campus — this in practice means from all those “useless” humanities and social science departments, many of which haven’t been allowed to make a new full-time hire in years (the law school made eight in 2025) — the law school was unable to pay faculty and staff raises out of its regular budget this spring, and had to raid gift funds in order to do so. Regental and university rules don’t allow us not to pay the regent-approved raises, so as soon as we can no longer raid this particular piggy bank we’ll have to start laying people off, probably next year, or at the latest the year after that.
It’s not entirely clear how the university expects to attract and retain talent while explicitly broadcasting that dissenting voices might as well pack up their desks in advance. But maybe that’s the point. If the school finds itself on the brink of layoffs, it might behoove them to push people out the door.
Still, is there no one out there clamoring to be a law school dean? Because you’d think a search might turn up someone willing to consider the job. Maybe even someone who hadn’t embroiled a school in a public and damaging discrimination case.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Colorado Law School Dean Reappointed Amid Mass Faculty Disapproval appeared first on Above the Law.
A paltry 27 percent of eligible faculty favored reappointing Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss. Meanwhile, some 90 percent of student group leaders solicited for their thoughts also objected to her keeping the job. In response, the University of Colorado Law School decided… to reappoint the dean.
At this point, Colorado Law might just be trolling its faculty and students for kicks.
More faculty explicitly voted against granting the dean another run at the post — roughly 38 percent — while a handful formally abstained and a quarter just refused to vote one way or the other. The ABA actually has a rule against appointing deans “over the stated objection of a substantial majority of the faculty” without good cause. The school hasn’t gone into that. But Trump wants to eliminate the ABA’s status as the official law school accreditor — presumably so he can set up Trump University College of Law if he ever leaves office. Maybe the school feels it can get in the administration’s good graces by breaching the ABA’s accreditation rules first!
The reappointment confounds on a lot of levels. Back in 2023, Colorado professor Paul Campos sued the school for discrimination after a curiously low evaluation that no one would explain. The school settled in 2024 because the dean responded to the suit by removing Campos from a key committee assignment, leaving a paper trail of retaliation that was as much “bad litigation strategy” as Labor & Employment final exam hypo. Since retaliating against employees rarely works out unless you have six justices on speed dial — the school covered all of Campos’s legal fees and gave him a chunk of money to end the case.
As Campos himself said of the reappointment in comments to the local news, “If you essentially have your institution admit you’ve been found liable for violating the civil rights of one of your tenured faculty members, and not only did (the university) settle (the lawsuit) for a significant amount of money but you get removed as that person’s immediate supervisor … it’s kind of amazing someone would get reappointed under those circumstances.”
Hey, they reappointed Alina Habba and there are explicit statutes against that, so anything’s possible in 2025.
But as Campos explains in a post over at Lawyers, Guns, Money, it’s not just a matter of his personal legal issues with the dean’s tenure. While the dean claimed that diversity is her primary goal, faculty pointed to the school losing multiple non-white scholars under her leadership. At the same time, the school is hiring like mad, pushing its faculty-student ratio down to Yale & Stanford levels without finding a way to bring in Yale & Stanford levels of money.
The financial situation is so bad that, despite the enormous subsidy, equal to 104% of its self-generated revenues, the law school gets from central campus — this in practice means from all those “useless” humanities and social science departments, many of which haven’t been allowed to make a new full-time hire in years (the law school made eight in 2025) — the law school was unable to pay faculty and staff raises out of its regular budget this spring, and had to raid gift funds in order to do so. Regental and university rules don’t allow us not to pay the regent-approved raises, so as soon as we can no longer raid this particular piggy bank we’ll have to start laying people off, probably next year, or at the latest the year after that.
It’s not entirely clear how the university expects to attract and retain talent while explicitly broadcasting that dissenting voices might as well pack up their desks in advance. But maybe that’s the point. If the school finds itself on the brink of layoffs, it might behoove them to push people out the door.
Still, is there no one out there clamoring to be a law school dean? Because you’d think a search might turn up someone willing to consider the job. Maybe even someone who hadn’t embroiled a school in a public and damaging discrimination case.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
