Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

10 Most-Cited Immigration Law Faculty in the U.S., 2016-2020 (CORRECTED)

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited law faculty working on immigration law (including the intersection of immigration and criminal law & procedure ["crimmigration"]) 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."

Immigration Law

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	Kevin R. Johnson	University of California, Davis	560	63
2	Ingrid Eagly	University of California, Los Angeles	430	51
3	Adam Cox	New York University	390	47
4	Cristina Rodriguez	Yale University	380	48
5	Hiroshi Motomura	University of California, Los Angeles	360	68
	Gerald Neuman	Harvard University	360	69
7	Jennifer Chacon	University of California, Berkeley	290	48
8	Cesar Garcia Hernandez	Ohio State University	280	39
9	Juliet Stumpf	Lewis & Clark College	250	53
10	Michael Kagan	University of Nevada, Las Vegas	220	47
	Other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Ilya Somin	George Mason University	590	48
	Gabriel (Jack) Chin	University of California, Davis	520	57
	Amanda Frost	American University	260	39

 

Subject-matter rankings update

I've decided to withdraw the 30 most-cited in "Public Law," and will instead disaggregate that category a bit into "Administrative and/or Environmental Law," "Legislation [including statutory interpretation and legislative process]," and "Immigration Law."   Also still coming are election law, legal ethics/legal profession, and a new addition, "Employment and/or Labor Law."  

20 Most-Cited Critical Theories of Law Faculty in the U.S., 2016-2020

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the twenty most-cited law faculty in critical theories of law (including Critical Race Theory and feminist legal theory) 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."

Critical Theories of Law:  Feminist and Critical Race

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	Kimberle Crenshaw	Columbia University; University of California, Los Angeles	810	62
2	Devon Carbado	University of California, Los Angeles	680	55
3	Martha Minow	Harvard University	660	67
4	Richard Delgado	University of Alabama	650	81
5	Catharine MacKinnon	University of Michigan	630	75
	Dorothy Roberts	University of Pennsylvania	630	65
7	Ian Haney Lopez	University of California, Berkeley	480	57
	Robin West	Georgetown University	480	67
9	Jerry Kang	University of California, Los Angeles	470	53
10	Martha Fineman	Emory University	430	71
11	Joan Williams	University of California, Hastings	370	69
12	Janet Halley	Harvard University	330	69
13	Cheryl Harris	University of California, Los Angeles	310	69
14	Mari Matsuda	University of Hawaii	300	65
	Angela Onwuachi-Willig	Boston University	300	48
16	Nancy Leong	University of Denver	290	42
17	Jean Stefancic	University of Alabama	260	81
18	Ruth Colker	Ohio State University	250	65
	Katherine Franke	Columbia University	250	62
20	Patricia Williams	Northeastern University	210	70
		Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in these areas
	Martha Nussbaum	University of Chicago	720	74
	G. Mitu Gulati	University of Virginia	640	55
	Kevin Johnson	University of California, Davis	560	63
	Gabriel (“Jack”) Chin	University of California, Davis	520	57
	Gerald Torres	Yale University	220	69

 

20 Most-Cited Corporate & Securities Law Faculty in the U.S., 2016-2020 (CORRECTED 10/20/21))

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the twenty most-cited law faculty in corporate law and/or securities regulation 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."

CORPORATE LAW & SECURITIES REGULATION

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	John Coffee, Jr.	Columbia University	1140	77
2	Lucian Bebchuk	Harvard University	930	66
3	Stephen Bainbridge	University of California, Los Angeles	920	63
4	Ronald Gilson	Columbia University	810	75
5	Reinier Kraakman	Harvard University	750	72
6	Jill Fisch	University of Pennsylvania	690	61
7	Stephen Choi	New York University	640	55
8	Steven Davidoff Solomon	University of California, Berkeley	620	50
9	Donald Langevoort	Georgetown University	570	70
10	Marcel Kahan	New York University	550	59
11	Jeffrey Gordon	Columbia University	540	71
12	Mark Roe	Harvard University	520	70
13	Robert Thompson	Georgetown University	510	72
14	Roberta Romano	Yale University	500	69
15	William Wilson Bratton	University of Miami	470	70
	Edward Rock	New York University	470	65
17	John Coates	Harvard University	460	57
18	James Cox	Duke University	450	78
	Bernard Black	Northwestern University	450	68
20	Randall Thomas	Vanderbilt University	440	66
	Other high-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Jonathan Macey	Yale University	920	66
	David Skeel	University of Pennsylvania	500	60

This is another field, like tax, where some really first-rate scholars are not represented on the most-cited list.  Robert Bartlett at Berkeley and Paul Mahoney at Virginia are two examples that immediately leap to mind.  These most-cited lists certainly always pick out many of the genuinely leading figures, but there is no substitute for expert evaluation of written work when it comes to appointments!

The Yale Law School spectacle continues

What an embarrassment (again!).

10 Most-Cited Antitrust Faculty in the U.S., 2016-2020

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited law faculty writing on antitrust 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."

Antitrust

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	Herbert Hovenkamp	University of Pennsylvania	950	73
2	Joshua Wright	George Mason University	470	44
3	Michael Carrier	Rutgers University	360	51
	Daniel Crane	University of Michigan	360	51
5	C. Scott Hemphill	New York University	320	48
	Christopher Leslie	University of California, Irvine	320	57
7	William Kovacic	George Washington University	310	69
	D. Daniel Sokol	University of Southern California	310	47
9	Spencer Waller	Loyola University, Chicago	230	64
10	Bruce Kobayashi	George Mason University	190	62
		Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Eric Posner	University of Chicago	2240	56
	Mark Lemley	Stanford University	1910	55
	Louis Kaplow	Harvard University	950	65
	Einer Elhauge	Harvard University	540	60
	George Priest	Yale University	400	68

 

10 Most-Cited Torts and Insurance Law Faculty in the U.S., 2016-2020 (CORRECTED)

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited law faculty writing on torts and/or insurance law 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."

Torts and insurance law

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	John C.P. Goldberg	Harvard University	430	60
2	Benjamin Zipursky	Fordham University	410	61
3	Tom Baker	University of Pennsylvania	340	62
	Catherine Sharkey	New York University	340	51
5	Kenneth Abraham	University of Virginia	320	75
6	Robert Rabin	Stanford University	290	82
7	Daniel Schwarcz	University of Minnesota	250	43
8	Kyle Logue	University of Michigan	230	56
9	Anthony Sebok	Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University	220	58
10	Mark Geistfeld	New York University	190	63
		Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in these areas
	Richard Epstein	New York University	1740	78
	Steven Shavell	Harvard University	1130	75
	Omri Ben-Shahar	University of Chicago	670	59
	Saul Levmore	University of Chicago	400	68
	W. Kip Viscusi	Vanderbilt University	400	71

 

"The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America"

A draft of this paper is now available, which will be presented at Georgetown next month.  It picks up on some ideas first mentioned in an earlier blog post and presentation in Turin, which generated a lot of interest:  finally there is a shareable paper. Here is the abstract:

The Internet is the epistemological crisis of the 21st-century: it has fundamentally altered the social epistemology of societies with relative freedom to access it. Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust. The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs. Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example. Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons: salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference. Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The Internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible (and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of experts), while even the traditional media in the U.S., thanks to the demise of the “Fairness Doctrine,” has contributed to the same phenomenon. I argue that this crisis cries out for changes in the regulation of speech in cyberspace—including liability for certain kinds of false speech, incitement, and hate speech--but also a restoration of a version of the Fairness Doctrine for the traditional media.

Nobel prize in economics awarded for innovation in causal inference from observational data (Michael Simkovic)

Three renowned labor economists, David Card (Berkeley), Joshua Angrist (MIT) and Guido Imbens (Stanford Business School) shared the Nobel prize in economics for their pioneering work using observational (i.e., non-experimental) data for causal inference.  This work facilitated empirical analysis of the effects of various legal and public policy changes, which are enacted in the real world and not under laboratory conditions.  Many scholars in law & economics and empirical legal studies built on their work and relied on the techniques the prize-winners developed.  

Card is famous for a series of difference-in-differences analyses across state borders that showed that moderate increases in minimum wage often don't lead to unemployment, as had been previously believed based on economic theory and simplifying assumptions.  Card's work was met with substantial skepticism, and conflicting claims from other empiricists, but he eventually changed the conventional wisdom among economists--a triumph of empiricism over theory and of science over ideology.  Card is a co-editor of the Handbook of Labor Economics.

Angrist and Imbens developed new ways to identify Local Average Treatment Effects, such as the use of instrumental variables. Angrist is also a co-author of Mostly Harmless Econometrics, a text that is widely used to train economists, law professors with an empirical bent, and other researchers.  Imbens' methodological work is taught heavily in an empirical studies workshop run by Bernard Black at Northwestern and the late Matt McCubbins at Duke.  Imbens is also the co-author of a popular book on empirical methods, Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences.  

Black & McCubbin's workshop--which I highly recommend--is intended to help law professors and other researchers learn to engage in more sophisticated empirical analysis.

In widely cited work, Angrist found strong evidence that military service--specifically in Vietnam--adversely affected subsequent earnings.  Imbens and Angrist have also found strong evidence that education substantially increases subsequent earnings, using changes and variation in compulsory schooling laws. The causal relationship between education and earnings is now widely accepted among labor economists and other empiricists.

 

20 Most-Cited Intellectual Property Faculty in the U.S., 2016-2020 (CORRECTED)

CORRECTED 9/2/21:  Prof. Sprigman was wrongly omitted from the top 20.

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the twenty most-cited law faculty in intellectual property law 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."

Intellectual Property

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2021
1	Mark Lemley	Stanford University	1910	55
2	Robert Merges	University of California, Berkeley	780	62
3	Pamela Samuelson	University of California, Berkeley	660	73
4	Dan Burk	University of California, Irvine	580	59
5	Rochelle Dreyfuss	New York University	570	74
	Peter Menell	University of California, Berkeley	570	63
7	John Duffy	University of Virginia	480	58
8	Rebecca Tushnet	Harvard University	470	48
9	Jay Kesan	University of Illinois	440	59
10	Jeanne Fromer	New York University	420	46
11	Ted Sichelman	University of San Diego	410	50
12	Rebecca Eisenberg	University of Michigan	400	66
	Jane Ginsburg	Columbia University	400	66
	Arti Rai	Duke University	400	55
15	John Golden	University of Texas, Austin	380	50
16	Lisa Larrimore Oullette	Stanford University	360	40
17	Barton Beebe	New York University	340	52
	Michael Meurer	Boston University	340	63
	David L. Schwartz	Northwestern University	340	51
20	Shyam Balganesh	Columbia University	330	39
	Colleen Chien	Santa Clara University	330	47
	Jessica Litman	University of Michigan	330	68
	Christopher Jon Sprigman	New York University	330	55
		Other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Gideon Parchomovsky	University of Pennsylvlania	580	53
	Julie Cohen	Georgetown University	670	57
	Daniel Hemel	University of Chicago	500	36
	Robert Bone	University of Texas, Austin	490	70
	Jonathan Masur	University of Chicago	460	43