Friday, August 27, 2021
10 Most-Cited Tax Scholars in the U.S., 2016-2020
Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited tax professors in the U.S. for the period 2016-2020 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May/early June of 2021, and that the pre-2021 database did expand a bit since then). Numbers are rounded to the nearest ten. Faculty for whom roughly 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."
Tax
Rank |
Name |
School |
Citations |
Age in 2021 |
1 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah |
University of Michigan |
420 |
64 |
2 |
Michael Graetz |
Columbia University |
380 |
77 |
3 |
David Weisbach |
University of Chicago |
310 |
58 |
4 |
Daniel Shaviro |
New York University |
300 |
64 |
5 |
Victor Fleischer |
University of California, Irvine |
270 |
50 |
Lawrence Zelenak |
Duke University |
270 |
63 |
|
7 |
Alan Auerbach |
University of California, Berkeley |
210 |
70 |
Joseph Bankman |
Stanford University |
210 |
66 |
|
9 |
David Gamage |
Indiana University, Bloomington |
200 |
43 |
10 |
Leandra Lederman |
Indiana University, Bloomington |
190 |
55 |
Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area |
||||
Louis Kaplow |
Harvard University |
950 |
65 |
|
Daniel Hemel |
University of Chicago |
500 |
36 |
|
Kristin Hickman |
University of Minnesota |
440 |
51 |
|
Brian Galle |
Georgetown University |
290 |
48 |
|
Yair Listokin |
Yale University |
230 |
46 |
(A note on the limitations of the Westlaw database is worth remarking on here. James Hines, an economist at Michigan, who holds a joint appointment in both economics and law, is a very major tax scholar, but got fewer than 190 citations in the law review database during this five year period. During that same time period, he received more than 5,000 citations according to Google Scholar! Of course, most of those would have been in economics, rather than law, journals, as well as books, dissertations, working papers, and journals in cognate disciplines to economics and law. Similarly, Reuven Avi-Yonah had more than 2,500 citations according to Google Scholar for the period 2016-2020, and David Weisbach had nearly 2,000 citations according to Google Scholar. For scholarly impact in law specifically, the Westlaw database is probably still a better metric, even if it understates total scholarly impact and even if it misses some outstanding scholarsa, like Hines.)
https://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2021/08/10-most-cited-tax-scholars-in-the-us-2016-2020.html