Top Ten Ranking Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings

 ¶  Most Cited Faculty, 2000-02
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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. 

Rank Scholar (age in 2000) Citations School
1 Laurence Tribe (59) 5460 Harvard University
2 Cass Sunstein (46) 4940 University of Chicago
3 Richard Epstein (57) 3900 University of Chicago
4 Ronald Dworkin (69) 3820 New York University/University of London
5 John Hart Ely (62) 2870 University of Miami
6 Bruce Ackerman (57) 2670 Yale University
7 Daniel Farber (50) 2650 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
8 Mark Tushnet (55) 2640 Georgetown University
9 William Eskridge, Jr. (49) 2400 Yale University
10 Ronald Rotunda (55) 2130 University of Illinois
11 Owen Fiss (62) 2080 Yale University
12 Akhil Amar (42) 2070 Yale University
13 Arthur Miller (66) 2060 Harvard University
14 Richard Delgado (n/a) 2050 University of Colorado, Boulder
14 Frank Michelman (64) 2050 Harvard University
16 Martha Minow (46) 1990 Harvard University
17 Catharine MacKinnon (54) 1960 University of Michigan/University of Chicago
18 John Nowak (53) 1940 University of Illinois
19 Duncan Kennedy (58) 1910 Harvard University
20 John Coffee, Jr. (56) 1890 Columbia University
21 Geoffrey Hazard, Jr. (71) 1840 University of Pennsylvania
22 Jonathan Macey (45) 1790 Cornell University
23 Philip Frickey (47) 1780 University of California, Berkeley
24 Derrick Bell (70) 1710 New York University
25 Lawrence Friedman (70) 1680 Stanford University
26 Erwin Chemerinsky (47) 1620 University of Southern California
27 Kathleen Sullivan (45) 1600 Stanford University
28 Daniel Fischel (50) 1590 University of Chicago
29 Mary Ann Glendon (62) 1580 Harvard University
30 Michael McConnell (45) 1560 University of Utah
30 Martin Redish (55) 1560 Northwestern University
30 Deborah Rhode (48) 1560 Stanford University
33 Sanford Levinson (59) 1540 University of Texas, Austin
34 William Landes (61) 1520 University of Chicago
35 Charles Fried (65) 1480 Harvard University
36 Mari Matsuda   (44) 1460 Georgetown University
37 Robin West (46) 1430 Georgetown University
38 Charles Lawrence (57) 1410 Georgetown University
39 Morton Horwitz (62) 1400 Harvard University
39 Geoffrey Miller (50) 1400 New York University
41 Paul Brest (60) 1390 Stanford University
41 Peter Schuck (60) 1390 Yale University
43 Richard Stewart (60) 1330 New York University
44 Anthony Kronman (55) 1310 Yale University
45 Douglas Laycock (52) 1280 University of Texas, Austin
46 Patricia Williams (49) 1260 Columbia University
47 Margaret Jane Radin (59) 1240 Stanford University
48 Michael Perry (55) 1230 Wake Forest University
48 Suzanna Sherry (46) 1230 Vanderbilt University
50 Herbert Hovenkamp (52) 1210 University of Iowa


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:

Robert Cooter (55) 1190 University of California, Berkeley
Richard Fallon  (48) 1190 Harvard University
Geoffrey Stone (54) 1190 University of Chicago
Kimberle Crenshaw (41) 1180 Columbia University (another CRT scholar)
Ian Ayres (41) 1170 Yale University
Kent Greenawalt (64) 1170 Columbia University


Other scholars with more than 1000 citations are:

T. Alexander Aleinikoff (48) Georgetown University
Jesse Choper (65) University of California, Berkeley
Melvin Eisenberg (66) University of California, Berkeley
Allan Farnsworth (72) Columbia University
Marc Galanter (69) University of Wisconsin, Madison
David Luban (51) Georgetown University
Jerry Mashaw (59) Yale University
Henry Monaghan (66) Columbia University
Richard Pierce, Jr. (57) George Washington University
George Priest (53) Yale University
Judith Resnik (50) Yale University
Steven Shavell (54) Harvard University
Robert Summers (67) Cornell University
Roberto Unger (n/a) Harvard University
William van Alstyne (66) Duke University
James J. White (66) University of Michigan


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

Douglas Baird (47) University of Chicago
Anthony D'Amato (63) Northwestern University
Theodore Eisenberg (53) Cornell University
Robert Ellickson (59) Yale University
Thomas Franck (69) New York University
Ronald Gilson (54) Columbia University/Stanford University
Louis Kaplow (44) Harvard University
Lewis Kornhauser (50) New York University
John Langbein (59) Yale University
Edward Rubin (52) University of Pennsylvania
Joseph Sax (64) University of California, Berkeley
Alan Schwartz (60) Yale University
Robert Scott (56) University of Virginia
Joel Seligman (50) Washington University, St. Louis
Detlev Vagts (n/a) Harvard University
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