The Most Cited Legal Academics 2013-17 (Updated)

A new report on the academic influence of law faculties and tallies of legal citations by specialty.

As Eugene noted, there is a new, updated study of law school "scholarly impact" by Gregory Sisk, et al. This study looks to measure the impact that different schools' law faculties have upon legal scholarship by looking at citation counts. (VCU isn't ranked, but as Ilya noted, it would apparently do quite well.)

In light of the new study, Brian Leiter has posted updated lists of the most cited legal scholars over the 2013-2017 period. Here are the top ten:

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Area(s)	Age in 2018
1	Cass Sunstein	Harvard University	4900	Constitutional, Administrative, and Environmental Law, Behavioral Law & Economics	64
2	Erwin Chemerinsky	University of California, Berkeley	2570	Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure	65
3	Eric Posner	University of Chicago	2330	Law & Economics, International Law, Commercial Law, Contracts	53
4	Mark Lemley	Stanford University	2180	Intellectual Property and Cyberlaw	52
5	Richard Epstein	New York University, University of Chicago	2165	Constitutional Law, Torts, Law & Economics	75
6	William Eskridge, Jr.	Yale University	2160	Constitutional Law, Legislation	67
7	Akhil Amar	Yale University	1600	Constitutional Law	60
8	Thomas Merrill	Columbia University	1595	Administrative, Constitutional, and Property Law	69
9	Mark Tushnet	Harvard University	1590	Constitutional Law, Legal History	72
10	Jack M. Balkin	Yale University	1580	Constitutional Law, Cyberlaw	62

In addition, Leiter has started to post lists of the most cited law faculty by subject area. Here are the fields he's tallied thus far:

• Corporate Law & Securities Regulation
• Criminal Law & Procedure (led by the VC's own Orin Kerr!)
• Commercial Law
• Constitutional Law (with an appearance by VC blogfather Eugene Volokh)
• Public Law (excluding Constitutional Law)

In addition, Rick Hasen has posted the most cited legal scholars in Election Law over the same period at his Election Law Blog. (Leiter's list of Eleciton Law scholars is here.)

Leiter has announced he will post additional subjects in the coming days, and I will update this post as his rankings appear.

UPDATES: Here are additional rankings in particular specialty areas posted by Leiter:

• Law & Economics (including Behavioral Law & Econ)
• Law & Social Science (excluding Law & Econ)
• Law & Philosophy
• Legal History
• Tax
• Intellectual Property & Cyberlaw
• Civil Procedure
• Torts/Insurance
• International Law & National Security

UPDATES: Here's a post on how Sisk and Leiter address name misspellings and the omission of author names in multi-author articles.

Here's a list of the most cited Originalist scholars at the Originalism Law Blog.

Here, in addition, is an interesting post about the pros and cons of using the Westlaw JLR database as opposed to Google Scholar, or some other metric.

Here's a list of health law scholars, including professors from other fields, put together by Mark Hall and Glenn Cohen.