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