June 16, 2003

Various readers had suggested compiling a ranking of most cited faculty taking in to account how many years the faculty were in law teaching.  That list, based on a Westlaw JLR database search in late May and early June, follows.  The "cites per year in law teaching" refers to the number of articles citing work by the legal scholar in question, not the number of actual cites within articles.  The 2002-03 AALS Directory was used to determine years in law teaching. 

This is the last list of most cited faculty I will be compiling.  This latest list has convinced me that the citation counts are more misleading than informative, for reasons various readers have pointed out.  First, they say more about which areas are "hot" in the legal academy (and thus well-represented in law reviews) than about who is doing the most important work.  Thus, the lists, as before, are overwhelmingly dominated by scholars in the public law fields, Critical Race Theory, and some law and economics.  Second, the ordinal listing bears no relationship at all to actual judgments that informed scholars would make about the relative quality of the work of scholars on the top 50 list.  Third, while the list represents overall a strong and distinguished group of scholars, it's still the case that a quarter of those on the list would have difficulty being appointed at many top law schools:  so judgments about the merit of the work still varies.  Fourth, and most seriously, the list misleads by who it omits:  Joseph Raz, for example, is a better legal philosopher than Ronald Dworkin, but he is absent; many important members of the Yale faculty are represented, but at least equally talented faculty are missing (Carol Rose, Robert Ellickson, Alan Schwartz, Jerry Mashaw, Roberta Romano, etc.); the same for the Berkeley faculty (Robert Cooter, Franklin Zimring, Robert Merges, etc.), the Chicago faculty (where are Saul Levmore, Lisa Bernstein, R.H. Helmholz, etc.?), the Texas faculty (Lawrence Sager, Philip Bobbitt, Jane Stapleton, etc.), the Virginia faculty (G. Edward White, Robert Scott, Kenneth Abraham, Michael Klarman, etc.), the Columbia faculty (Thomas Merrill, Ronald Gilson, Kent Greenawalt, etc.) and on and on.  The sins of omission on lists like these are, I fear, too substantial to make it worthwhile to compile them in the future; perhaps someone else will undertake the task.