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.

Comments

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

This list suggests the roster at Balkinization could constitute a formidable faculty.

A Balkinization-Volokh Conspiracy joint venture could be one hell of a thing, perhaps even enough to challenge Prof. Sunstein.

[bernard11]

How should this be corrected for "same-school bias?"

My guess, only that, is that law professors may cite their faculty colleagues more freely than others, and that may even extend to former teachers, classmates, or students, etc.

[DjDiverDan]

Does the study make any distinction at all between a favorable citation and an unfavorable citation? For example, while Erwin Chemerinsky has published a few articles that I really like and find persuasive, like his defense of freedom of speech from the heckler's veto, and his analysis of sovereign immunity, he has also written some very bad scholarship on Second Amendment rights, and some pretty disturbing stuff on federalism. So, if a court cites a Chemerinsky article on federalism or on Heller as an example of sloppy thinking on the subject, is that counted exactly the same as a favorable nod to a Chemerinsky on the subject of sovereign immunity?

[Eddy]

I wonder how well Scalia would qualify on the "most cited" metric - given all the articles (or parts of articles) devoted to criticizing him.

[bernard11]

My impression is that this counts only citations in law review articles, not court opinions.

[Bruce Hayden]

I am glad that Mark Lemley made the list. He and I first met on Cyberia-L, and then in person when we moved to Austin about the same time. First met EV in person (he was also on Cyberia-L) when he was a speaker at one of Lemley's CyberLaw conferences there in Austin. Mark still sends me packages of his articles a couple times a year - he is an article writing machine.

His work maybe more significant than his ranking here would indicate. There is probably no academic with anywhere near his influence and effect in the patent world. While still at UT in Austin his research was used by Congress to justify converting the US patent system from 17 year from issue term, to 20 years from original (priority) application. And in the decades since then, he developed the definitive database on the realities of patent prosecution, which he and his coauthors continue to mine to this day. Which is weird for a guy with essentially no real technical background before he started teaching law. We don't always agree on interpretation of his data, but he still is really still the only source of objective data when it comes to patent policy in this country.

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