Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

15 Most-Cited Law & Social Science (excluding economics) faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (UPDATED AND CORRECTED)

 Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the fifteen most-cited law & social science (excluding economics) faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May of 2018, and that the pre-2018 database did expand a bit since then).  This is meant to capture scholars who work under the "law & society" rubric and/or who deploy methodologies from psychology, sociology, political science and anthropology to law, including empirical legal studies scholars.  Numbers are rounded to the nearest five.    Faculty for whom 75% or more of their citations (based on a sample) are in this area are listed; others with less than 75% of their citations in this field (but still a plurality) are listed in the category of "other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area."  

The updates and changes incorporate the Sichelman data for multi-author articles which affected many faculty here, including Rachlinski, Hoffman, Guthrie, Heise and Braman.

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2018
1	Tom Tyler	Yale University	985	68
2	Lee Epstein	Washington University, St. Louis	840	60
3	Jeffrey Rachlinski	Cornell University	725	52
4	Tom Ginsburg	University of Chicago	695	50
5	David Hoffman	University of Pennsylvania	580	42
6	Chris Guthrie	Vanderbilt University	530	51
7	John Ferejohn	New York University	500	74
8	Malcolm Feeley	University of California, Berkeley	440	76
9	Charles Sabel	Columbia University	435	71
10	Linda Hamilton Krieger	University of Hawaii	425	64
11	Michael Heise	Cornell University	395	58
	Jonathan Simon	University of California, Berkeley	395	59
13	Herbert Kritzer	University of Minnesota	385	71
14	Anne Joseph O’Connell	Stanford University	375	48
15	Donald Braman	George Washington University	370	49
		Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Dan Kahan	Yale University	1025	52
	G. Mitu Gulati	Duke University	735	50
	Brian Tamanaha	Washington University, St. Louis	685	61
	Bernard Black	Northwestern University	515	65
	Carrie Menkel-Meadow	University of California, Irvine	465	69

 

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Correcting for the problem of multi-author articles cited as "John Smith et al." in citation studies

Ted Sichelman (San Diego) contacted me with a proposed solution to the problem of undercounting multi-author articles in citation studies, a problem that washes out at the school level, but not necessarily at the level of individual authors, as noted before.  Prof. Sichelman here explains what he did:

Using the HeinOnline citation data, which does not suffer from multi-author limitations, I examined every 3+-author article with a large number (70+) of all-time citations in HeinOnline (as of late 2016), because articles with fewer citations are very unlikely to have any sizable effect on the most-cited lists (which I confirmed for a medium-sized sample set). For each second and later-listed author of these highly cited articles, I estimated a high number of "missing" citation counts in Westlaw's "law review & journals" database for the period 2013-17. Then, using this high-estimate missing count, Brian examined the raw data from Sisk et al. to determine if any author in the Hein-generated list might make a most-cited list (who didn't originally) or might substantially move up a list in ranking. Next, for each of the authors Brian flagged, I searched Westlaw to determine the missing (Westlaw) citation count (using the Sisk et al. methodology) for the period 2013-17 in two phases (providing information to Brian in each phase), generating accurate counts of missing citations for flagged authors. For completeness, these final counts included missing Westlaw citations not only for highly cited articles, but all articles in HeinOnline with more than 10 citations (as of late 2016) published since 1995 (other than for Mark Lemley and Cass Sunstein, because the additional citations for their less highly cited articles would not materially increase their cite counts). If you have any questions on the methodology, please feel free to email me (tsichelman@sandiego.edu).

I am grateful to Prof. Sichelman for undertaking this and sharing the results with me.  I will be updating some earlier rankings (no dramatic differences, but some slight ones) and incorporating this data into the specialty area citation rankings to come.

Pope Center: UNC Chapel Hill remains "a problem" for suggesting that programs to alleviate poverty might help alleviate poverty (Michael Simkovic)

When North Carolina researchers who study poverty criticized conservative law makers in North Carolina, political leaders reminded academics of the dangers of speaking out against their bosses.  Republicans responded by shutting down the law school's poverty center, crippling its civil rights center, and voting for draconian cuts to UNC Chapel Hill law school's budget.  North Carolina's Republicans were also among the first to pass the Koch funded, Goldwater Institute backed "Campus Free Speech Act", which is a thinly veiled effort to politicize universities, and monitor and intimidate administrators, students, and faculty under the guise of promoting "free speech."

North Carolina's leading funder of libertarian and Republican causes, James Arthur Pope (usually referred to as 'Art' Pope), is apparently displeased that even after the punishment meted out on the University of North Carolina, the University still hasn't completely capitulated.  Mr. Pope's point person on bullying universities into submission, George Leef of the John Pope Franklin Center, recently penned an editorial in the National Review calling UNC "a problem" because of its summer reading list for incoming students.

One of several UNC campuses committed the mortal sin of asking incoming students to read and discuss a pulitzer prize winning non-fiction book which tells the story of American families struggling with the hardships of poverty.  The book suggests that government programs to alleviate poverty actually sometimes help alleviate poverty.  (In libertarian parlance, this is "advocating statism.")  Worse yet, it seems like the kind of book that might be appreciated by Senators Sanders and Warren, two progressive Democrats.

What's notable about Leef's criticism of the book is that he doesn't point to factual errors, inconsistencies, selective citations, logical errors or other problems of quality.[1]  For Leef, the book isn't bad because it's sloppy. It's bad because it might create sympathy for policies that extremely rich people who want lower taxes dislike.

An essay in Commentary which Leef praises also attacks scientists at UNC for supporting the international scientific consensus on man-made Global Warming.  Universities agreeing with the international scientific consensus allegedly violates principles of "political neutrality." 

To some major donors and those whom they fund, "free speech" is too often a euphemism for donor control of public dialogue, and by extension public policy.  

 

[1] This should not be read as an endorsement of the book.  To my mind, there are substantive flaws which could have been pointed out, such as failing to note that high cap rates on low income housing often reflect higher risks for investors and lower expectations of appreciation in value.

Which law school's alumni are in the first FAR?

This sometimes includes LLM and SJDs, as well as laterals:

1.  Harvard University (28)

2.  New York University (25)

3.  Yale University (20)

4.  Columbia University (15)

5.  Stanford University (12)

5.  University of Michigan (12)

7.  University of California, Berkeley (11)

8.  University of Chicago (9)

9.  University of California, Los Angeles (8)

9.  University of Pennsylvania (8)

11. University of Texas, Austin (7)

12. University of Virginia (6)

13.  Northwestern University (5)

14. Cornell University (3)

14.  Duke University (3)

14. University of Minnesota (3)

Apart from NYU, which has far too many candidates on the market, these numbers look about right given past placement performance.

In a USNews.com world, don't confuse citation counts with quality

I assume this is obvious, but just in case let me say it:   citation counts have a very imperfect correlation with quality.  But in a world where law faculties are ranked by Bob Morse, an ignorant non-academic looking to make a living, we need alternative metrics that reflect what we in the legal academy actually do.  There are many first-rate scholars who are as good as any of those on the various lists I have been and will be posting but who didn't happen to make them; off the top of my head:  in law & philosophy, Mark Greenberg (UCLA) and Stephen Perry (Penn); in law & economics, Eric Talley (Columbia) and Abraham Wickelgren (Texas); in legal history, Risa Goluboff (Virginia) and Sally Gordon (Penn); in empirical legal studies, Anup Malani (Chicago) and Ed Morrison (Columbia); in administrative law, Anne O'Connell (Stanford) and Ed Rubin (Vanderbilt); and many others.

 

10 Most-Cited Tax Faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited tax faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May of 2018, and that the pre-2018 database did expand a bit since then).  Numbers are rounded to the nearest five.    Faculty for whom 75% or more of their citations (based on a sample) are in this area are listed; others with less than 75% of their citations in this field (but still a plurality) are listed in the category of "other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area."     

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2018
1	Michael Graetz	Columbia University	390	74
2	Reuven Avi-Yonah	University of Michigan	370	61
	David Weisbach	University of Chicago	370	55
4	Daniel Shaviro	New York University	340	61
5	Victor Fleischer	University of California, Irvine	300	47
	Lawrence Zelenak	Duke University	300	60
7	Leandra Lederman	Indiana University, Bloomington	240	52
8	Edward McCaffery	University of Southern California	220	60
	Edward Zelinsky	Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University	220	68
10	Alan Auerbach	University of California, Berkeley	215	67
	Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Louis Kaplow	Harvard University	1080	62
	Kristin Hickman	University of Minnesota	395	48
	Brian Galle	Georgetown University	320	45
	Mark Gergen	University of California, Berkeley	260	62

 

10 Most-Cited Legal History Scholars in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited legal historians in the U.S. (teaching in law schools) for the period 2013-2017 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May of 2018, and that the pre-2018 database did expand a bit since then).  Numbers are rounded to the nearest five.    Faculty for whom 75% or more of their citations (based on a sample) are in this area are listed; others with less than 75% of their citations in this field (but still a plurality) are listed in the category of "other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area."    

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2018
1	Lawrence Friedman	Stanford University	990	88
2	Michael Klarman	Harvard University	800	59
3	G. Edward White	University of Virginia	535	77
4	James Whitman	Yale University	425	61
5	Phillip Hamburger	Columbia University	395	61
6	Stuart Banner	University of California, Los Angeles	345	55
7	William Nelson	New York University	315	78
8	John Witt	Yale University	275	46
9	Edward A. Purcell, Jr.	New York Law School	245	77
10	William E. Forbath	University of Texas, Austin	240	66
	Christopher Tomlins	University of California, Berkeley	240	65
	Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Reva Siegel	Yale University	1340	62
	Herbert Hovenkamp	University of Pennsylvania	985	70
	Robert W. Gordon	Stanford University	365	77
	David Bernstein	George Mason University	420	51

 

10 Most-Cited Law & Philosophy Scholars in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited law & philosophy faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May of 2018, and that the pre-2018 database did expand a bit since then).  Numbers are rounded to the nearest five.    Faculty for whom 75% or more of their citations (based on a sample) are in this area are listed; others with less than 75% of their citations in this field (but still a plurality) are listed in the category of "other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area." 

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2018
1	Jeremy Waldron	New York University	1120	65
2	Martha Nussbaum	University of Chicago	930	71
3	Joseph Raz	Columbia University (part-time)	705	79
4	Michael S. Moore	University of Illinois	470	75
5	Brian Leiter	University of Chicago	460*	55
6	John Finnis	University of Notre Dame	350	78
7	Scott Shapiro	Yale University	300	52
8	Seana Shiffrin	University of California, Los Angeles	280	49
9	Brian Bix	University of Minnesota	210	56
10	Andrei Marmor	Cornell University	205	59
		Scholars who work partly in this area
	Frederick Schauer	University of Virginia	1530	72
	Lawrence Solum	Georgetown University	845	64
	Larry Alexander	University of San Diego	680	75
	David Luban	Georgetown University	640	69
	Kent Greenawalt	Columbia University	580	82

* Raw count adjusted downward (based on a sample of 100 hits) by 17% (to arrive at 460) to reflect percentage of citations to my blogs unrelated to my law & philosophy work (a small number were related, most were about legal education).

Westlaw searches: misspellings, multi-author articles and other problems

Greg Sisk gave me permission to share his response to an inquiry (on which I was cc'd) about some deficiencies of the Westlaw database and the searches Prof. Sisk and colleagues perform.  One difficulty that has come up is common misspellings of names; another is that in multi-author articles or books, sometimes (not all the time) only the first author is listed.   Here is what Prof. Sisk had to say, which seems to me sensible:

Your email raises an issue that we’ve seen and thought about every time we do this.  And it affects me as well, as I’ve conducted empirical research that has left me at the end of a list of authors on a piece.

Any methodology has limitations, which we've always forthrightly acknowledged.  The strength of Westlaw is also sometimes a weakness – that it is quite literal.  Being a literal search engine means that if a name is missing in a citation, then a Westlaw search simply will not uncover it.

When it comes to methodology, we have to consider what is practical and possible in a large-scale study involving thousands of tenured faculty members at a hundred law schools and how to implement that in a manner consistent across-the-board.  When we are looking a literally hundreds of thousands of citations for thousands of law professors, we have to rely mostly on a mechanical counting method.

Your email illustrates why we’re unable to integrate a resolution to the et al. issue into our methodology.  To do so consistently across the board, we’d first have to know each individual professor that is affected by this (which of course wouldn’t be apparent in the Westlaw database but would require outside information), and then run not merely one alternative search but potentially multiple alternatives for each type of “et al.” citation.  Within each of those searches, we’d then have to eyeball each of the citations to determine whether it is a correct hit and is duplicative of results from another alternative, and then calculate the right formula for coming up with a final count.  And we’d have to replicate the process across 3,378 law professors.

Importantly, our primary objective is comparison of law faculties, and this issue is not isolated to a particular law school’s faculty.  I've run some test searches in the past -- admittedly on an ad hoc basis and not thoroughly empirical in nature -- and it appears that this problem is vanishingly small when looking at the collective impact of a law school's faculty, which is the central feature of the Leiter Scholarly Impact ranking.  In other words, given that this phenomenon exists at any school with productive faculty, it washes out across the comparison of one faculty to another.  Indeed, as a rough calculation, citation counts for the typical school would have to be under-stated by a few hundred before it likely would affect a school’s overall ranking.

By contrast, for a dean conducting an annual evaluation, it would be quite right for these individual re-calculations to be made to come up with a better count.  Indeed, as we’ve noted, for individual evaluation, one might consult other databases, such as Google Scholar which allows for setting up a profile that, on a case-by-case basis, pulls these citations into one measure.  While that’s not practical for a large-scale study like ours, it may be indispensable for an individual evaluation.

And, because this affects me as well, it is one more reason that I have a policy of insisting with law reviews that citations in my articles include the names of all authors, at least out to three (and sometimes I’ve been able to insist that it go out to four).

Now this is probably far more than you wanted to know.  But I hope it helps explain things and at least shows that we really do take methodology matters seriously and try to think them through.

Of course, in the lists of high-impact scholars in particular areas, this may matter more, though whether it would have significant effects on the results (as opposed to just affecting one or two ordinal placements, which are meaningless anyway) is not clear.

UPDATE:  Ted Sichelman (San Diego) sent me an example, and its effect was to move the author from 4th to 3rd in the law & social science category.  That strikes me as quite minor, but I did make the change.

15 Most-Cited Law & Economics (incl. behavioral L&E) faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the fifteen most-cited law & economics scholars (including behavioral law & economics) in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May of 2018, and that the pre-2018 database did expand a bit since then). Typically these scholars deploy economic analysis across multiple legal domains.  Numbers are rounded to the nearest five.    Faculty for whom 75% or more of their citations (based on a sample) are in this area are listed; others with less than 75% of their citations in this field (but still a plurality) are listed in the category of "other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area."   

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2018
1	Eric Posner	University of Chicago	2340	53
2	Steven Shavell	Harvard University	1245	72
3	Ian Ayres	Yale University	1170	59
4	Louis Kaplow	Harvard University	1080	62
5	Robert Cooter	University of California, Berkeley	840	73
6	Einer Elhauge	Harvard University	645	57
7	Russell Korobkin	University of California, Los Angeles	610	50
8	Christine Jolls	Yale University	560	51
9	A. Mitchell Polinsky	Stanford University	485	71
10	George Priest	Yale University	480	65
11	Michael Abramowicz	George Washington University	470	46
12	Saul Levmore	University of Chicago	415	65
13	W. Kip Viscusi	Vanderbilt University	410	68
14	Lewis Kornhauser	New York University	405	68
15	Douglas Ginsburg	George Mason University	400	72
		Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Cass Sunstein	Harvard University	4955	64
	Mark Lemley	Stanford University	2200	52
	Richard Epstein	New York University, University of Chicago	2165	75
	Lucian Bebchuk	Harvard University	985	63
	Robert Scott	Columbia University	890	74