Awhile back, I reported on my law school ranking site, that I wouldn't be doing any more citation studies of individual faculty, because,
[C]itation counts [of individuals] are more misleading than informative, for reasons various readers have pointed out. First, they say more about which areas are “hot” in the legal academy (and thus well-represented in law reviews) than about who is doing the most important work. Thus, the lists, as before, are overwhelmingly dominated by scholars in the public law fields, Critical Race Theory, and some law and economics. Second, the ordinal listing bears no relationship at all to actual judgments that informed scholars would make about the relative quality of the work of scholars on the top 50 list. Third, while the list represents overall a strong and distinguished group of scholars, it’s still the case that a quarter of those on the list would have difficulty being appointed at many top law schools: so judgments about the merit of the work still varies. Fourth, and most seriously, the list misleads by whom it omits: Joseph Raz, for example, is a better legal philosopher than Ronald Dworkin, but he is absent; many important members of the Yale faculty are represented, but at least equally talented faculty are missing (Carol Rose, Robert Ellickson, Alan Schwartz, Jerry Mashaw, Roberta Romano, etc.); the same for the Berkeley faculty (Robert Cooter, Franklin Zimring, Robert Merges, etc.), the Chicago faculty (where are Saul Levmore, Lisa Bernstein, R.H. Helmholz, etc.?), the Texas faculty (Lawrence Sager, Philip Bobbitt, Jane Stapleton, etc.), the Virginia faculty (G. Edward White, Robert Scott, Kenneth Abraham, Michael Klarman, etc.), the Columbia faculty (Thomas Merrill, Ronald Gilson, Kent Greenawalt, etc.) and on and on. The sins of omission on lists like these are, I fear, too substantial to make it worthwhile to compile them in the future; perhaps someone else will undertake the task.
Overrepresentation of certain fields--which are perennial favorites in the law reviews--can, of course, be dealt with by looking to field-specific citation counts (an example is here). And others have suggested that many omissions (as well, perhaps, as strange inclusions) would be cured by looking at citations per year in teaching to measure scholarly impact in a way that does not simply favor those who have been around longer.
To illustrate why that isn't right, take a look at the ten most-cited-per-year faculty in the U.S. in a field I know a bit about, namely, law and philosophy (approx. age of faculty member in parentheses)
1. Ronald Dworkin (73) New York University/University College London (140/year)
2. Jeremy Waldron (51), Columbia University (54/year)
3. Martha Nussbaum (57), University of Chicago (46/year)
4. Dennis Patterson (49), Rutgers University, Camden (39/year)
5. Jules Coleman (57), Yale University (37/year)
5. Michael Moore (61), University of Illinois (37/year)
7. Larry Alexander (61), University of San Diego (36/year)
8. Joseph Raz (65), Columbia University/Oxford University (33/year)
9. Brian Leiter (42), University of Texas, Austin (32/year)
10. John Finnis (64), University of Notre Dame/Oxford University (28/year)
It is certainly amusing to come in one cite per year behind the most important living figure in legal philosophy, but it is also indicative of the limitations of the measure--as is the fact that Raz trails all the others on the list, including those, like Martha Nussbaum who don't do much work in legal philosophy at all. The explanations for the odd ordering are simple: Dworkin's work relates to constitutional law and theory, which is what accounts for most of his citations; Patterson and Moore also work in substantive areas (commercial law and criminal law, respectively), as well as legal philosophy; most of my citations come from my work on American Legal Realism and the philosophical foundations of evidence, both topics more popular in U.S. law reviews than, e.g., the nature of legal authority or reasons; Coleman has done seminal work in tort theory and the philosophical foundations of economic analysis of law, both topics of far more interest to law professors; and so on.
The simple fact is that work at the core of legal philosophy is not much-discussed in law reviews, which is why someone like Raz who has done more important work than probably anyone on the core issues fares relatively poorly by citation measures. The latter fact also explains why this top ten list omits a host of folks who would be on most experts' list of ten-or-so top writers at the intersection of law-and-philosophy in the U.S. (such as Liam Murphy and Stephen Perry at NYU, Leslie Green who is half-time at Texas, Scott Shapiro at Cardozo, and so on).
If citation studies are less illuminating than expert evaluations in particular fields, there is still reason to hope that across whole faculties some of the omissions will even out. Certainly our last study of per capita scholarly impact produced a plausible rank-ordering of schools by faculty quality, even if certain schools (e.g., Georgetown) benefitted from prominence in "trendy" areas (like Critical Race Theory). Perhaps it is the case that even if the ordinal listing of faculty by citations bears only a crude relationship to expert opinion in any particular area, an ordinal listing of faculties by per capita citations fares better because there are many fields where citations better track quality and academic reputation. Although it has been awhile since I have updated the law school ranking site, the next major initiative will be an updated ranking of law schools by per capita citations. We shall see if the results bear this out.
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