A preview of what Hein citation rankings might look like (courtesy of Ted Sichelman)

Recently, Professors Paul Heald (Illinois) and Ted Sichelman (San Diego) released law school faculty rankings that combined SSRN downloads and HeinOnline citations (here). (I'm skeptical about the value of SSRN rankings, as I've noted many times in the past:  e.g., here and here).  In their study, Heald and Sichelman included Hein-only rankings, combining both historical (all-time) and recent (2016) citations. In order to get a better estimate of recent scholarly impact, plus to get an initial view of what the US News citation rankings will look like, Professor Sichelman has kindly provided me rankings just based on Hein citations over a 5-year period (2012-2016).

Total scores were calculated based on 2 x mean + median (like the Sisk et al. methodology). Although U.S. News has not decided on its ultimate approach, it appears likely it will use a similar metric. Additionally, like US News plans to do, Professor Sichelman has included pre-tenure faculty. 

Some differences between Heald & Sichelman's data (which Professor Sichelman used to construct the rankings below) and US News are the following:   (1) Heald & Sichelman used spring 2016 faculty whereas US News will use fall 2019 faculty; (2) about two-thirds of the schools responded to Heald & Sichelman's requests for faculty name variants, whereas presumably a much higher fraction responded to US News's requests (those schools not responding effectively reduce their citation counts); and (3) Hein will use a slightly different citation identification methodology for the US News rankings than Heald & Sichelman's. All of these differences will lead to some shifts in the US News rankings from what appears below.

But given the high correlation (about 0.90) between Heald & Sichelman's Hein-only rankings and the Sisk et al. rankings (which do not include pre-tenure faculty and use Westlaw, which counts books, treatises, and non-law publications, unlike Hein), the rankings below should be roughly similar to the 2020 US News citation rankings. Of course, there are likely to be some notable shifts for a subset of schools.  I expect Irvine (#7 below, which has since lost both Chemerinsky and Fisk to Berkeley) will drop out of the top ten (but will probably remain in the top 15) while UC Berkeley (#15 below, which added Chemerinsky, as well as highly-cited Orin Kerr [Kerr was at George Washington for purposes of this study]) will move into the top ten.

1	Yale
2	Harvard
3	Chicago
4	NYU
5	Stanford
6	Columbia
7	UC Irvine
8	Penn
9	Vanderbilt
10	Duke
11	UCLA
12	Cornell
13	George Washington
14	Northwestern
15	UC Berkeley
16	Virginia
17	Georgetown
18	Minnesota
19	Michigan
20	Texas
21	UC Davis
22	Washington University, St. Louis
23	Boston University
24	Illinois
25	Fordham
26	St. Thomas (Minnesota)
27	Cardozo
28	George Mason
29	Florida State
30	Emory
31	William & Mary
32	University of Arizona
33	Wake Forest
34	Notre Dame
35	Maryland
36	Utah
37	Brooklyn
38	Colorado
39	Case Western
40	Iowa
41	Washington & Lee
42	San Diego
43	Ohio State
44	Indiana/Bloomington
45	Alabama
46	San Francisco
47	University of Florida
48	Southern California
49	North Carolina
50	University of Georgia