This is based on a Westlaw search in early June 2000.  Only faculty eligible are faculty listed as tenured or tenure-track in the 1999-2000 AALS Directory.  Citation counts are rounded to the nearest ten.  There is a rough correlation between total citations and prestige, less of a correlation between total citations and actual quality (I would estimate that a fifth of the faculty on the top 50 list could not get appointed at Texas, for example).  Two law professors often considered the "smartest" in the legal academy--Jeff Strnad at Stanford (in tax and corporate law), and Alan Schwartz at Yale (in commercial and corporate law)--do not make these lists, though Schwartz comes close.  But the lists are heavily dominated by constitutional law scholars, as well as scholars in currently "hot" areas, like Critical Race Theory. 

The list, of course, reflects the current interest in Critical Race Theory in the legal academy, as well as the mutual citation practices of the prolific authors associated with this movement.  If one removed the Critical Race Theory scholars from this list (Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence, Patricia Williams), these additional scholars would have made the top 50:

Other scholars with more than 1000 citations are:

Other scholars with nearly 1000 citations who are not primarily in constitutional law (which is a high-citation field) are: