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.