I interrupt my blog hiatus to note this surprising development.  I have tried to avoid saying anything about Campos for many years now, but this seems worth remarking on, given how rare such suits are.  Campos's self-serving explanation for the lawsuit is here, and the complaint itself is here.  The two most important lines from the blog post, it seems to me, are these:

In May of last year, I received a very low annual evaluation grade – on that put me in the bottom 2% of the faculty historically – from a faculty peer evaluation committee, despite having had by all conventional metrics an outstanding year in terms of both publishing and service,

Was this evaluation anomalous?  It seems like it would take a lot to get into the bottom 2% "historically."  Discovery will no doubt uncover how long he has received sub-standard evaluations.  Also from the blog post:

Under federal law, whether the underlying discrimination claim is ultimately vindicated is irrelevant to the employer’s liability for retaliating against the complaining employee. Such illegal retaliation requires the defendant to pay the plaintiff’s costs.

My guess is Campos's attorneys are taking this case on contingency, hoping for a payout on the retaliation claim, given the weakness of the discrimination claim (more on that in a moment).  The evidence of retaliation, however, purports to be this email from law school Dean Inniss to Campos (paragraph 34):

Given your recent communications with me regarding your concerns with the law school evaluation process and your indication of possible litigation, I have removed you from the evaluations committee for the upcoming fiscal year.

As Berkeley's Professor Kerr observed on Twitter:  

I assume Colorado will respond that Campos wasn't taken off… the committee because of retaliation. Rather, Campos had said he anticipated suing the university because the evaluations committee had discriminated against him. That's the same committee he was set to join…. I wonder if Campos saying he planned to sue the university over the work of that committee provided the Dean with a non-retaliatory reason not to be on that committee.

The discrimination claim is only as plausible as the non-discriminatory reasons for Campos's sub-standard compensation are weak:  if the latter reasons are, in fact, strong, then the former is doubtful.  (Put aside that Campos's current Dean is an African-American woman, and his prior Dean was a Native-American man:  perhaps they really just hate Latinos?) 

The complaint tries to suggest there can't be good non-discriminatory reasons, offering such "LOL" lines as, "Professor Campos has had an academic career most notable for impressive scholarly accomplishment" (paragraph 4), and "Professor Campos is a leader in his field of study" (par. 5).  One can debate how much of his writing in the last twenty years counts as "scholarship" and how much as "journalism," but however one carves it up, these latter claims could not be vindicated, even before getting to the question of the quality of the work.   The complaint also asserts that, "He is a prolific writer, with five published books, including his most recent book,which was published by the University of Chicago Press last fall" (par. 5).  The complaint does not mention that the most recent book is on being a sports fan, or that one of the other books is self-published, that another one is co-authored (and has had no impact), another has been mostly ignored, or that his most-cited book was on obesity from nearly twenty years ago.    

The complaint also notes that "the failure of CU Law to award Professor Campos an endowed professorship is particularly egregious in light of the fact that, between 2015 and 2021, Professor Campos was cited in academic literature more frequently than any of his colleagues, including any of his colleagues with endowed professorships."  According to Google Scholar, more than half his citations during this period derived from his 2004 book on obesity and a co-authored five-page article in an epidemiology journal from 2006, also on obesity (he was one of five authors of that brief essay).  (As an aside, anyone who studies citations knows that the health fields have promiscuous citation practices.)  Most of the rest of the citations were due to an essay pasting together stuff from his notorious scam blog, and a notoriously incompetent op-ed in the New York Times about the cost of higher education.   It is not hard to see why a committee evaluating faculty for their scholarly accomplishment might take a dim view of all of this.  More to the point, Google Scholar also reveals very few publications during the period 2015-2021, some of which were clearly journalistic exercises not contributions to scholarship (recall Alabama lawprof Paul Horwitz's quip that Campos is "essentially a journalist moonlighting as a law professor").  Surely that thin record of productivity would loom much larger than citations to older work in an evaluation of professional performance.

In addition, according to the Sisk data on citations, based on Westlaw searches for the period 2016-2020, 16 out of 33 tenured Colorado law faculty had more citations in law reviews than Campos, including almost all those with endowed professorships.

And then, of course, there is the question of Campos's teaching over this period of time, which would also factor into his compensation  The complaint makes no claims about the quality or success of his teaching, perhaps for a reason.

The bottom line is that the discrimination claims look weak at this stage, and the retaliation claim does not seem much stronger, but may be his better bet under the circumstances.

FEBRUARY 19, 2024 UPDATE:   The retaliation claim was, indeed, the stronger one, and he got a modest "nuisance" settlement from the University for it.  The settlement included no relief for any of the alleged discrimination.