Brian Leiter's well-known list of the top 25 law schools as ranked by faculty scholarly impact has promoted a group of St Thomas faculty to extend the methodology to cover the top 70 law schools:
This study explores the scholarly impact of the faculties at all law schools accredited by the American Bar Association and then ranks the Top 70 law faculties. Refined by Professor Brian Leiter, the “Scholarly Impact Score” for a law faculty is calculated from the mean and the median of total law journal citations over the past five years to the work of tenured members of that law faculty. This study extends Professor Leiter’s study of the Top 25 law faculties to rank the Top 70 law faculties in order by scholarly impact. Following the same methodology and search parameters, we also applied a discount rate to back-date Scholarly Impact Scores to January 15, 2010, so that the results for additional law faculties could be integrated with Professor Leiter’s Scholarly Impact Ranking for the Top 25 law faculties reported earlier this year. See “Top 25 Law Faculties in Scholarly Impact, 2005-2009,” at http://www.leiterrankings.com/faculty/2010_scholarlyimpact.shtml. In addition to a school-by-school ranking, we report the mean, median, and weighted score for each law faculty, along with a listing of the tenured law faculty members at each ranked law school with the highest individual citation counts.
Representing about one-third of accredited American law schools, the 70 law faculties ranked in this study have demonstrated concretely a strong collective commitment to legal scholarship. As previously ranked by Professor Leiter, the law faculties at Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford stand out nationally in scholarly prominence, followed by several others that are traditionally ranked among the elite law schools. The new law school at California-Irvine shows early signs of becoming a scholarly leader, while Florida State continues its upward movement into the Top 25. Extending the ranking to the Top 70, Cardozo and Ohio State fall just outside the Top 25, while George Mason, Hofstra, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), Hawaii, Brooklyn, Nevada, San Diego, Chicago-Kent, and Missouri-Columbia achieve strong rankings well above that assigned by U.S. News. Several law schools accredited within the past twelve years—the University of St. Thomas, Nevada, Chapman, and Florida International—have already made a scholarly impact that dramatically outpaces their lagging academic reputations.
Their results confirm much of Leiter's survey, while giving us info about second tier schools that are either up and coming or lagging.
It's interesting that several new schools did so well, but when one looks at them, it turns out that they all have made a conscious effort to hire well-regarded, fairly senior laterals. The long run question will be whether they can sustain their early results through strong rookie hiring and retention of promising juniors. Or will their early gains lead to them being targeted for raids by schools higher in the pecking order.
