What better way to attract attention to a new magazine than to produce an idiosyncratic list, based on no discernible criteria, of the top 500 lawyers in America?
That's what the new LawDragon magazine has done. Most of those on the list are practitioners and jurists, of course, though two dozen or so academics make the list, including, interestingly, a good number of clinical faculty (not surprising, given the practice orientation of the list), as well as a few media regulars. Three some-of-the-time law teachers on the list--Walter Dellinger (Duke), Richard Posner (Chicago), and Michael Tigar (American)--were listed without any mention of their academic affiliations, perhaps correctly in terms of where they spend most of their time.
In any case, here are the academics listed as academics on the list: Khaled Abou El Fadl (UCLA); William Allen (NYU); Erwin Chemerinsky (Duke); John Coffee (Columbia); David Cole (Georgetown); Noah Feldman (NYU--though he is being wooed by Yale and Harvard); Edward Foley (Ohio State); Tamar Frankel (BU); Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard); Kenneth Klee (UCLA); Harold Koh (Yale); Mark Lemley (Stanford); Lawrence Lessig (Stanford); Lawrence Marshall (Stanford); J. Thomas McCarthy (San Francisco, also in practice); Arthur Miller (Harvard); Alan Morrison (Stanford; also in practice); Burt Neuborne (NYU); Charles Ogletree (Harvard); Gary Roberts (Tulane); Bryan Stevenson (NYU; also in practice); Kathleen Sullivan (Stanford; also in practice); Cass Sunstein (Chicago); Laurence Tribe (Harvard); Elizabeth Warren (Harvard).
According to LawDragon--which, by the way, is based in Los Angeles--the top 500 lawyers in America include 5 faculty each from Harvard and Stanford (Harvard is more than twice the size of Stanford), 4 faculty from NYU, and 2 from UCLA--but just 1 each from Chicago, Columbia, and Yale, and none at all from Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, Penn, and Cornell, among others. No Bruce Ackerman, Alan Dershowitz, Richard Epstein, Yale Kamisar, Douglas Laycock, Catharine MacKinnon, Robert Scott, or James J. White--all scholars whose impact on theory and practice is as great, in many cases greater, than those on the list. Go figure.
Everyone loves a ranking!
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