We have finished the scholarly impact study described here. We ranked the top 35 law faculties based on per capita mean and median scholarly impact based on citations to each member of the faculty since 2000. The complete results will be on-line in September, including instructions for schools wanting to complete comparative self-studies. Adjustments will be made if it turns out that schools not studied would have had a rounded mean per capita impact of 140 or higher or a rounded median per capita impact of 90 or higher. Cass Sunstein had 6180 cites at the time of the study, so any increase in his total will provide the relevant discount factor to be applied to the results. I'm posting here some previews of the results.
Here are the top twenty for mean per capita scholarly impact across the whole faculty (the number in parentheses is the normalized score, which makes for more meaningful comparison than the ordinal rank). The big story in these results, it seems to me, is the recovery of the Duke faculty from its doldrums at the turn of the century: their aggressive lateral recruiting has paid off. (And note that even without Chemerinsky, whose treatises generate huge numbers of citations, Duke would still have ranked 8th!) Also striking is the toll that raids by Harvard and Columbia have taken on the UVA faculty.
1. Yale University (100)
2. University of Chicago (95)
3. Stanford University (84)
4. Harvard University (75)
5. Columbia University (54)
6. New York University (53)
7. University of California, Berkeley (49)
8. Duke University (47)
9. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (35)
10. University of California, Los Angeles (34)
10. University of Texas, Austin (34)
12. Georgetown University (33)
12. Northwestern University (33)
14. Cornell University (32)
14. Vanderbilt University (32)
16. University of Pennsylvania (30)
17. University of Virginia (28)
18. George Washington University (27)
18. University of Illinois (27)
20. University of Arizona (25)
The full results will also include rankings by median per capita impact, and by an amalgmation of mean and median per capita impact.
Using the same data, I'll also compile some lists of most-cited scholars in various fields, as I did a number of years ago. Here, for example, is the new "top ten" most cited list for "Law and Philosophy"; after each name is the institutional affiliation, then the number of citations since 2000, and the scholar's age in 2007:
1. Ronald Dworkin (New York University): 3070 citations, age 76
2. Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago): 1130 citations, age 60
3. Jeremy Waldron (New York University): 1120 citations, age 54
4. Larry Alexander (University of San Diego): 980 citations, age 64
5. Michael S. Moore (University of Illinois): 920 citations, age 64
6. Joseph Raz (Columbia University): 840 citations, age 68
7. Jules Coleman (Yale University): 760 citations, age 60
8. John Finnis (University of Notre Dame): 640 citations, age 67
9. Brian Leiter (University of Texas): 410 citations, age 44
10. Brian Bix (University of Minnesota): 370 citations, age 45
10. Jeffrie Murphy (Arizona State University): 370 citations, age 67
10. Charles Taylor (Northwestern University): 370 citations, age 76
Here is a similar list for tax (since I don't know this field, I may well have missed someone whose publications and citations are primarily in tax--e-mail me corrections):
1. Michael Graetz (Yale University): 470 citations, age 63
2. Daniel Shaviro (New York University): 400 citations, age 50
3. Edward McCaffery (University of Southern California): 340 citations, age 49
4. Joseph Bankman (Stanford University): 320 citations, age 52
5. Reuven Avi-Yonah (University of Michigan): 290 citations, age 50
6. David Weisbach (University of Chicago): 280 citations, age 44
7. Edward Zelinsky (Cardozo Law School): 270 citations, age 57
8. James Strnad (Stanford University): 260 citations, age 55
9. Anne Alstott (Yale University): 240 citations, age 44
9. Lawrence Lokken (University of Florida): 240 citations, age 68
There were several runners-up to the top ten here, whose citation counts were awfully close to the top ten: Robert Peroni (University of Texas) with 230 citations; Marjorie Kornhauser (Arizona State University) with 220 citations; Alvin Warren (Harvard University) with 220 citations; and Lawrence Zelenak (Duke University) with 220 citations. Some scholars, of course, work across different fields. My colleague at Texas Mark Gergen also had 290 citations, but these were about evenly divided between his tax scholarship and his private law scholarship. So, too, Kyle Logue at Michigan had 250 citations, but many to his work on torts and insurance, others to his tax work. No doubt there are other scholars in a similar situation.
Here, finally, are the "top ten" most cited scholars working in constitutional/public law:
1. Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago): 6180 citations, age 53
2. Laurence Tribe (Harvard University): 3520 citations, age 66
3. Erwin Chemerinsky (Duke University): 3280 citations, age 54
4. William Eskridge (Yale University): 2810 citations, age 56
5. Mark Tushnet (Harvard University): 2780 citations, age 62
6. Kathleen Sullivan (Stanford University): 2660 citations, age 52
7. Bruce Ackerman (Yale University): 2550 citations, age 64
8. Akhil Amar (Yale University): 2470 citations, age 49
9. Daniel Farber (University of California, Berkeley): 2410 citations, age 57
10. Richard Fallon (Harvard University): 1640 citations, age 55
10. Robert Post (Yale University): 1640 citations, age 60
Runners-up for the top ten here are Richard Delgado (University of Pittsburgh) and Philip Frickey (University of California, Berkeley), each with 1560 citations, and Sanford Levinson (University of Texas) with 1510 citations. Richard Epstein (University of Chicago), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University), and Ronald Rotunda (George Mason University) all were cited enough to make the top ten here, but because they do substantial work in more than one field (in Epstein's case, the work cuts across many areas of law), they have not been included in the list above. (Arguably, Sunstein's work presents a similar issue, though his citation count is so high that even if we were to subtract, e.g., all the citations to the behavioral law and economics work, he would, in all likelihood, still be first on the list.)
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