February 19, 2009

This is a study that aims to identify the ten law faculties with the most "scholarly impact" as measured by citations during roughly the past four years. The methodology is the same as used in the 2007 study, though now excluding, per suggestion from many colleagues, untenured faculty from the count, since their citation counts are, for obvious reasons, always lower. The study also excludes judges who still do some teaching (like Guido Calabresi at Yale and Richard Posner at Chicago).

The study was conducted in early February of 2009, so incorporates some articles published in early 2009, but the bulk of the sample is made up of articles published in the years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. The study was prompted by questions from many colleagues and students about the effects of some high-profile faculty moves on the 2007 results: for example, the move of Cass Sunstein, first from the University of Chicago to Harvard University, and now his leaving academia for the Obama Administration; the move of Larry Lessig from Stanford to Harvard; and Richard Epstein's decision to formally split between Chicago and NYU, among others. (Although Epstein will not formally join the NYU faculty till 2010, I have counted him there as well for purposes of this study, since he has committed to be a tenured faculty member part-time starting then.) In general, law faculty who have already accepted senior offers for next year are credited to the school where they will teach in 2009-10.

The new law faculty at the University of California at Irvine presents a special case. So far, they have only a bit more than a dozen faculty. Given Dean Chemerinsky's very high citation count (he is now the most cited full-time law professor in the country, with Sunstein's departure for government service), to simply add his cite count to the currently small number of faculty would produce highly misleading results. At the same time, as a new law school, some indication of its scholarly impact performance seems especially relevant, so I have adopted the following device: I have assumed that the next thirteen hires will have the same scholarly impact as those already hired (not including Chemerinsky), and thus have estimated Irvine's per capita impact score on that basis (so basically Chemerinsky's citations plus (the total citations of all other faculty times 2) divided by the (current faculty size x 2) plus Chemerinsky).

Schools are rank-ordered by their weighted score, the average of their mean and median scholarly impact. The ten most cited faculty are listed in the final column; those over 70 in 2009 are marked with an asterisk. We studied 17 faculties based on the 2007 results as the ones likely to make it into the top ten for the time period studied here. Outside "the top ten" the faculties are not rank-ordered since it is possible that some faculties not studied might well have performed competitively.

After the ranking of schools by mean and median scholarly impact, there is a list of the ten faculty who were cited the most during this time period.

Notice that this list of the "ten most cited" faculty does not include either Judge Richard Posner, who is a Senior Lecturer and teaches part-time at the University of Chicago Law School, who was cited in 5300 articles during the last four years, or Cass Sunstein, formerly a professor at Harvard and a visiting professor at Chicago, who has since joined the Obama Administration, who was cited in 3,970 articles during this period.