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.