Law Rewiews' Prestige and Citations: A Misunderstood Relation?

Well, we're getting ever closer to the release of the 2009 US News law school rankings.  I've never been big on office pools, but maybe we ought to think about making some predictions on who's going to go up and who's going to go down.  Never can tell what kind of giggles thefacultylounge can gin up.  Actually, I now see via the magic of google that at least one of the student discussion boards is already on this case.

What I want to talk about, however, is a ranking of a different sort.  I'm interested in taking a long-term view of law review rankings.  I've talked some back at propertyprof about the relationship between law review citations and law school rankings.  Now I have a short paper up on ssrn, which (thanks to some terrific research assistance from Joseph Sherman) looks at the citations to articles that appeared about fifteen years ago in about a dozen leading law journals.  It looks at some of the very most prestigious journals (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago) as well as some of the other elite (Vanderbilt) and some of the other terrific journals (Indiana, Wisconsin, Hastings--hi Calvin!).  The idea was to see how individual articles fared.  It took its methodology from Andrew Oswald's article, which Danny Sokol put me onto, on citations to articles in prestigious economics journals.

As you might expect, citations to articles varied greatly.  So while Kathleen Sullivan's legendary Foreword to the Harvard Law Review was the big winner--and lots of articles in elite journals did really well--some of the most-cited articles in journals published outside the most elite journals did better than the less well-cited articles in the most elite journals.

Now, here's the graph, which plots citations per article in selected law reviews.  Each circle is an article.  Pretty illuminating, eh?  And perhaps not exactly what you would expect.

Here's the abstract:

This brief essay reports a study of citations to every article published in 1992 in thirteen leading law journals.  It uses citations as a proxy (an admittedly poor one) of article quality and then compares the citations across journals.  There are, not surprisingly, vast differences in number of citations per article. While articles in the most elite journals receive more citations on average than the less elite (but still highly regarded) other journals studied, some articles in the less elite journals are more heavily cited than many articles in even the most elite journals.  In keeping with studies in other disciplines and other citation studies of legal journals, the results here suggest that we should we wary of judgments about quality based on place of publication.  We should also be wary of judgments about quality of scholarship based on number of citations and we should, therefore, continue to evaluate scholarship through close reads of it.

Want to see more?  Here's a link to the essay.

Comments

[John C]

It's such a rube's game to try to determine with accuracy law review ranking or prestige. Over on Concurring Opinions today (or maybe it was Volokh . . . ) there was a post about strategies for placing papers, which from the comments boiled down to Kremlinology like timing: do I send in late February or early March? Do I send electronically or by hard copy? When do I expidite, and to which journals?

If these "methods" have any validity at all, and how or when you submit your article is any determinate of where it ultimately appears, gauging with accuracy the "prestige" of a particular journal seems foolish. Randomness would have just as much to do with article placement (seemingly) as quality.

In the end, it is probably true that, much like law schools themselves, you can probably only rank according to rough grouping (dare I say "tier"), and even that is fuzzy at the margins.