2015 Scholarly Impact Ranking for American Law Schools

This morning, Professor Brian Leiter posted on the Law School Reports the 2015 ranking of American law schools by Scholarly Impact.

The complete ranking and narrative are available here.

In 2012 and again in 2015, I have shepherded the Scholarly Impact study, along with my librarian colleagues here at the University of St. Thomas, Valerie Aggerbeck, Nick Farris, and Megan McNevin, assisted by a team of students led by Maria Pitner. The preparation of the Scholarly Impact Ranking involves months of painstaking work identifying tenured faculty at law schools, performing citation counts (including sampling where necessary), double-checking and reconciling results, and calculating scores, scaling, and ranking.

Three years ago, through a series of posts here on Mirror of Justice, I offered several arguments as to why scholarly work and scholarly impact are especially important to Catholic legal education. Those points remain just as salient today.

The first argument, made here, was that a meaningfully Catholic law school must be an intellectually engaged law school, which is not possible without a faculty also engaged in the quintessential intellectual activity of scholarly research and writing.

My second point, made here, was that through scholarly excellence and law school scholarly prominence, we witness to society the vibrancy of intellectual discourse by persons of faith and counter the anti-intellectual stereotype often attaching to religiously-affiliated institutions, including law schools.

My third point, made here, was that, as Catholic Christians, we have are called to share the Gospel, both directly and indirectly.  The central role of scholarly research in our academic vocation is affirmed by no less a Catholic authority than St. Pope John Paul II in the apostolic constitution for Catholic universities, Ex Code Ecclesiae:   “The basic mission of a University is a continuous quest for truth through its research, and the preservation and communication of knowledge for the good of society.”

In sum, while we are called to teaching and service as well, we cannot fully participate as academics in the search for the truth without also contributing to the scholarly literature, which reaches audiences beyond the walls of our own institution and which is preserved in medium so that we can affect the scholarly discourse long after we have departed. It is a tremendous privilege – and a grave responsibility.

With respect to the 2015 updating of the Scholarly Impact Ranking, I may be forgiven here for highlighting certain results for schools at which members of the Mirror of Justice family teach:

The University of Notre Dame ranks in the top 25.  Emory is ranked #27. The University of St. Thomas ranks in the top 40 (at #39) for Scholarly Impact -- almost 100 ranking levels above its relegation in the U.S. News ranking.

Below the fold, I've set out the top 40 ranking in a table:

Table 1:  Summary of Scholarly Impact Ranking of Law Faculties, 2015

Rank	Law School	Weighted Score
1	Yale	1766
2	Harvard	1384
3	Chicago	1300
4	New York University	1123
5	Stanford	1013
6	California-Irvine	994
7	Columbia	945
8	Duke	910
9	Vanderbilt	812
9	California-Berkeley	808
11	Pennsylvania	780
12	Northwestern	756
13	Cornell	748
13	UCLA	733
15	Michigan	640
15	Georgetown	636
17	Virginia	608
17	George Washington	600
19	Minnesota	564
20	Texas	554
21	George Mason	537
21	Washington University	533
21	Boston University	532
24	California-Davis	519
25	Case Western	479
25	Notre Dame	468
27	Illinois	467
27	Emory	460
29	Cardozo	442
29	Arizona	441
29	Colorado	437
29	Ohio State	434
33	North Carolina	431
33	Brooklyn	421
35	Indiana (Bloomington)	414
35	Utah	413
35	Fordham	408
35	University of San Diego	399
39	Florida State	395
39	Arizona State	393
39	USC	393
39	University of St. Thomas (Minn.)	393
39	Iowa	390