Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Ranking the Scholarly Impact of Law Faculties in 2021

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 nearly 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, five Catholic law schools appear in or near the Top 25: Georgetown, Fordham, the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), the University of San Diego, and Notre Dame.

I am delighted that my own school, the University of St. Thomas, has remained inside the Top 25 again (at #23), far above its U.S. News ranking.

Fordham has been a remarkable success story on scholarly impact over the past decade, having debuted in our 2021 ranking at #43 and moving subsequently through #35 and #29 to arrive in the Top 25 at #23 for 2021.  While not suggesting it is anything miraculous, they do seem to be changing the water into scholarly wine at Fordham Law.

The University of San Diego continues to rank considerably higher for its faculty’s scholarly impact than the questionable U.S. News ranking. For 2021, The University of San Diego places #30 in the Scholarly Impact ranking, but is remarkably under appreciated when U.S. News drops it to #86.

Over the next few days, as I do every three years, I will follow-up with a three-part series on the importance of scholarly activity and scholarly impact for Catholic legal education.

Table 1:  Summary of Scholarly Impact Ranking of Law Faculties, 2021

Rank

Law School

Weighted Score

1

Yale

1345

2

Chicago

1110

3

Harvard

940

4

NYU

921

5

Columbia

814

6

Stanford

752

6

Cal-Berkeley

749

8

Pennsylvania

663

9

Virginia

646

9

Vanderbilt

644

11

UCLA

605

12

Duke

597

13

Michigan

545

14

Cal-Irvine

537

15

Northwestern

528

15

Cornell

527

17

Georgetown

514

18

George Washington

472

18

Texas

471

18

Minnesota

468

21

Washington U

440

22

Cal-Davis

435

23

George Mason

420

23

Fordham

414

23

Boston U

411

23

U. St. Thomas (MN)

410

27

Arizona

387

27

William & Mary

384

29

USC

382

30

U. San Diego

367

31

Notre Dame

346

31

Illinois

344

33

Cardozo

340

33

Brooklyn

338

33

Colorado

336

36

Case Western

325

36

Utah

326

36

North Carolina

323

36

Emory

317

40

Kansas

311

40

Hastings

305

40

Chicago-Kent

304

43

Ohio State

300

43

Alabama

293

43

Georgia

289

46

American

287

46

Florida State

278

46

Maryland

278

49

Temple

275

49

BYU

268

49

Wake Forest

265

Note:  Original post updated to include discussion of the University of San Diego.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2021/09/ranking-the-scholarly-impact-of-law-faculties.html

Sisk, Greg | Permalink