ProfessorBainbridge.com

No brag, just fact

Brian Leiter's survey of law school faculty quality based on citation counts also includes lists of the most frequently cited faculty in various legal disciplines. Here's one that will be of interest to readers of this blog:

Corporate Law/Securities Regulation

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

 

Top 25 law faculties with the most scholarly impact

Brian Leiter's updated survey ranks law schools by citations to their faculty member's scholarship. Here's how UCLA did:

Rank

School

Normalized Score

Weighted Score (meanx2 plus median)

Mean score

Median score

Ten Most Cited Faculty (*indicates over 70)

15

University of California, Los Angeles

41

630

235

160

S. Bainbridge, K. Crenshaw, J. Kang, R. Korobkin, L. LoPucki, N. Netanel, K. Raustiala, K. Stone, L. Stout, E. Volokh

Paul Caron incorporates the new data into his summary of school ranks on a number of different measures of scholarly quality:

School

Citations

U.S. News Peer

SSRN Downloads

Mean Rank

UCLA

15

15

7

12.3

I'm curious that UCLA does so much better in SSRN downloads than citation counts.

Is Insider Trading Bad? If so, Why?

Megan McArdle ventures into insider trading policy and goes seriously awry:

The ostensible reason for insider trading bans is that they maintain retail investor faith in the market, by keeping them from getting rooked by unscrupulous dealings. Believe it or not, there are some arguments against this logic, but assume it's correct. ...

I know, I know . . . INSIDER TRADING!!!! WE ALL KNOW IT'S VERY BAD!!! But to the extent it's bad, it's bad because it lets the sophisticated and connected take advantage of the innocent.

Nope. I deal with this issue at some considerable length in my book Securities Law: Insider Trading, but a brief summary here may be helpful.