Citations to Political Science Profs in Law Reviews

Keith Whittington, a well-known public law scholar in the Politics Department at Princeton, has prepared an interesting study of the frequency of citation to political science professors who study law and courts.   The study confirms that law professors pay relatively scant attention to the quite interesting work on law that goes on in Political Science Departments.  Indeed, the top three faculty on the list--Chicago's Cass Sunstein, Yale's Bruce Ackerman, and Texas's Sanford Levinson--are all scholars whose primary appointment is in the law school at their university.  Indeed, half the top ten are faculty who spent most of their academic careers in law schools.  The five in the top ten who have spent their academic careers outside law schools are Austin Sarat at Amherst College, Michael Sandel at Harvard University, Jon Elster at Columbia University, Robert George at Princeton University, and Gerald Rosenberg at the University of Chicago.  None of these latter five, strikingly, would have made it on to a list of the 75 most cited legal scholars, and only one might have made it (just barely!) on to a list of the 100 most cited scholars in law reviews.