Ranking the Scholarly Impact of Law Faculties

Every three years, I lead a team at the University of St. Thomas to study the scholarly citations of thousands of tenured law professors (involving more than half-a-million citations) to measure the scholarly impact of American law faculties, that is, whether other scholars are actually relying on their written works of scholarship.  Using the basic methodology pioneered by Professor Brian Leiter at the University of Chicago, we rank approximately the top third of law schools.

With the full study available here, I am pasting the Top 50 below.  Notably, three Catholic law schools appear in or near the Top 25 -- Georgetown, the University of St. Thomas, and Notre Dame.

 

Rank	Law School
1	Yale
2	Harvard
3	Chicago
4	NYU
5	Columbia
6	Stanford
7	Cal-Berkeley
8	Duke
9	Pennsylvania
10	Vanderbilt
11	UCLA
12	Cal-Irvine
13	Cornell
14	Michigan
14	Northwestern
16	George Washington
16	Virginia
16	Georgetown
19	Texas
19	George Mason
21	Minnesota
21	Washington University
23	Cal-Davis
23	U. St. Thomas (MN)
23	USC
26	Notre Dame
27	Boston University
28	William & Mary
29	Colorado
29	Florida State
29	Fordham
32	Cardozo
32	Emory
32	Case Western
32	Arizona
36	Indiana-Bloomington
36	Illinois
36	North Carolina
36	U. San Diego
36	Arizona State
41	Maryland
41	Utah
41	Ohio State
44	Wake Forest
44	Hastings
44	Chicago-Kent
44	Brooklyn
48	Kansas
49	Alabama
49	BYU
49	Hofstra

In the next couple of days, I'll post my triennial thoughts on why scholarly work and scholarly impact are especially important for professors at Catholic law schools.