Leiter's Latest Scholarly Impact Study

Brian Leiter has posted the final version of his TOP 25 LAW FACULTIES IN SCHOLARLY IMPACT, 2005-2009 (AND HIGHEST IMPACT FACULTY IN 13 AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION) survey:

This is a study that aims to identify the 25 law faculties with the most “scholarly impact” as measured by citations during roughly the past FIVE years. ... Needless to say, citation studies are but one measure of the scholarly distinction of faculties. They tend to favor smaller faculties over larger faculties, which no doubt explains why schools like Texas and Virginia and Georgetown come out behind schools like Vanderbilt and Cornell, even though I don’t think any informed scholarly judgment would rate them that way.

UCLA ranks 15th. Absurdly, however, UCI ranks 9th, which calls into question the whole business, despite Leiter's efforts to explain why the way he scored Irvine is justified. Anyone who would say UC Irvine is a top ten school by any measure deserves to be visited by the guys in white coats.

Turning to the individual faculty member rankings, Leiter explains:

The ordinal rank in the “top ten” list should not, however, be taken to correspond to scholarly excellence or reputation. But those in “the top ten” are usually thought of as among the leading scholars in the area.

Here's the corporate law rankings:

Rank	Name	School	Total Articles Citing Name	Age in 2010
1	John Coffee	Columbia University	1500	66
2	Lucian Bebchuk	Harvard University	1060	55
3	Larry Ribstein	University of Illinois	960	64
4	Stephen Bainbridge	University of California, Los Angeles	850	52
5	Roberta Romano	Yale University	780	58
6	Ronald J. Gilson	Columbia University, Stanford University	770	64
7	Reinier Kraakman	Harvard University	760	61
8	Bernard Black	Northwestern University	730	57
9	Donald Langevoort	Georgetown University	720	59
10	Robert Thompson	Vanderbilt University	680	61
	Runners-up for the top ten
	Henry Hansmann	Yale University	640	65
	Mark Roe	Harvard University	620	59
	Lynn Stout	University of Califiornia, Los Angeles	610	53
	Stephen Choi	New York University	600	44
	Jill Fisch	University of Pennsylvania	600	50
	Highly Cited Scholars Whose Cites Are Not Exclusively in This Area
	Jonathan Macey	Yale University	1100	55
	Melvin Eisenberg	University of California, Berkeley	770	76

The Irvine absurdity takes some of the pleasure out of the exercise, but I'm still pleased both by my ranking and by the fact that I'm the youngest person on the top 10. I may never catch Lucian, considering that I have a life, but I'd settle for passing Jack Coffee one of these days.

Comments

[Brian]

Goodness, you UCLA folks are sensitive about Irvine's rise!

[Bryun Lighter]

Irvine can't really be called a "school" yet, since it has not produced one graduate, nor done anything of note beyond gathering a bunch of folks in one place at the taxpayer's expense.