Ranking the Scholarly Impact of Law Faculties -- 2024

Every three years, I lead a team at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) to study the scholarly citations of thousands of tenured law professors (involving some 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.  Five Catholic law schools appear in or near the Top 50-- Georgetown, the University of St. Thomas, the University of San Diego, Notre Dame, and the University of San Francisco.

In the coming days, I'll renew my thoughts about the importance/value of scholarship at Catholic law schools, which again I share every three years when this study is complete.

Rank	Law School	Weighted Score
1	Yale	1255
2	Chicago	1120
3	Harvard	1016
4	NYU	898
5	Columbia	813
6	Cal-Berkeley	747
7	Pennsylvania	739
8	Stanford	728
9	Vanderbilt	695
10	Virginia	669
11	Duke	636
11	UCLA	636
13	Cornell	612
14	Michigan	571
15	Georgetown	562
16	Northwestern	552
17	George Washington	507
18	Emory	474
18	Cal-Davis	470
20	Fordham	464
20	Texas	464
22	Cal-Irvine	439
23	William & Mary	428
23	Minnesota	427
23	U. St. Thomas	425
26	USC	408
27	Boston University	404
28	Washington University	387
29	Brooklyn	374
30	North Carolina	369
30	Florida	366
30	Utah	364
30	George Mason	361
34	Cardozo	355
34	Ohio State	353
34	U. San Diego	349
34	Florida State	346
38	Illinois	344
38	Notre Dame	338
38	Arizona	332
41	Colorado	328
42	BYU	316
43	Case Western	306
43	Cal-SF	304
43	Kansas	301
43	Arizona State	299
47	U. San Francisco	293
47	Georgia	291
47	Temple	289
47	Washington & Lee	287
47	Chicago-Kent	282