Each side is scoring points in New York City’s other subway series – the sporting rivalry between the law schools at Columbia and New York University. NYU has quietly lured away three top professors from New York’s Ivy League law school, while Columbia’s law school is in the quiet phase of a more than $300 million capital campaign to grow its 75-person faculty by half over 10 years, without increasing its student body.

NYU School of Law announced yesterday that one of the world’s top professors of law and philosophy, Jeremy Waldron, would leave Columbia to join its faculty in fall 2006. Mr. Waldron has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University. He has published eight books, including “God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought,” and has another forthcoming from the Oxford University Press.

Two other professors have made the move to Washington Square from Morningside Heights in the past year. Cynthia Estlund, who studies labor and workplace regulations, has agreed to join NYU’s faculty full time after spending a semester there as a visiting professor. Her husband, Samuel Issacharoff, a top professor of election law and laws related to democracy, left Columbia for NYU last year. All three are taking full tenured professorships.

The dean of Columbia’s law school, David Schizer, and the dean of NYU’s, Richard Revesz, told The New York Sun yesterday that their schools did not lure professors through bidding wars. Mr. Revesz said professors normally chose to move based on how supportive a school may be of their work and “what benefits the school’s intellectual community can bring to their work.” He said reduced teaching loads and more frequent sabbaticals are never used to sweeten job offers.

Mr. Revesz said the school helps out professors new to New York with housing. He added, “We’re not competing on the basis of housing, just as we’re not competing on any of these other factors.”

Mr. Issacharoff said he joined NYU because it had more scholars specializing in his field of inquiry. “I fit in here better,” he told the Sun. “I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

Ms. Estlund said, “People leave each for their own reasons. It’s a personal and largely idiosyncratic process.”

Mr. Waldron did not return messages requesting comment yesterday.

“It’s a strong set of appointments, yes, and significant losses for Columbia,” a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Brian Leiter, who runs the Leiter Report, a group Web log that covers law schools and legal issues, told the Sun via e-mail. “Top law schools are always in the market for senior talent. NYU, which had been battered by faculty losses of its own the last couple of years, needed to have a good year, and they are having a great year with these three from Columbia, as well as Rick Hills from Michigan and Robert Sitkoff from Northwestern.”

He added: “I don’t expect to see a continued defection of folks from Columbia to NYU.”

Mr. Sitkoff, who specializes in trust and estate law, and Roderick Hills, a scholar of federalism, will join the NYU faculty next year.

Columbia’s law school ranks fourth in US News and World Report’s top 100 law schools list. NYU’s law school ranks fifth.

Columbia has had several major hires of its own in the last two years, luring professors Robert and Elizabeth Scott from the University of Virginia School of Law this year – “a quite significant appointment,” Mr. Leiter said. Mr. Scott is noted scholar of contract and bankruptcy law. Ms. Scott studies juvenile and family law.

“We’ve had a very good year,” Mr. Schizer told the Sun in a telephone interview. He said the new hires, as well as several last year, marked the beginning of his plan to increase the school’s faculty by three or four professors each year, until it grows to 105 or 110 from 75. He added that the number of students at the law school would not increase. “Columbia’s got … great things going for it,” he said. “A way we can be stronger is getting the studentfaculty ratio down.”

Columbia’s law school has 1,239 students.

Mr. Schizer said the school would announce a “very ambitious” capital campaign to finance the hiring and other improvements in a year or two, after the school amasses a quarter to a third of the more than $300 million it hopes to raise in the next seven or eight years.

“It’s great fun, because the school is in this wonderful position, and our graduates are responding to that. It’s really an opportunity to take the school to the next level,” Mr. Schizer said.

Both Mr. Schizer and the NYU dean, Mr. Revesz, told the Sun yesterday that they did not see the two schools as competitors or adversaries.

“We were interested in these colleagues because they were terrific and were leaders in their areas and could add enormous intellectual distinction to our faculty,” Mr. Revesz said, referring to the three professors NYU’s law school lured away from Columbia. “Too much is made of these rivalries. We’re just very pleased to be able to continue building a spectacular faculty.”

Both deans said being in New York City was an advantage when it came to hiring new professors, especially for two-income families and particularly now that the city was considered a good place to raise children.

Hiring decisions are not the only battleground for the two schools. NYU and Columbia students will take their rivalry to the basketball courts on April 5 for their fifth annual Dean’s Cup basketball game, a fund-raiser for the public interest law programs at both schools. Even the schools’ professors will go head to head in a half-time game, giving the three new NYU hires a chance to score against their former Columbia colleagues.