Sunstein's Least-Cited Article?

The following vignette is a great example of why we should be quite skeptical of judging the quality of an article by how many citations it has....

I'm writing a short essay on a survey of student attitudes towards intestacy and also towards the marital elective share that I conduct on the first day of my trusts and estates class.  I survey student attitudes on those issues as a way of introducing them to some of the topics we're going to be talking about in class -- and I often find that the students' ideas about what should happen don't really match up at all with what does happen.  And therein begins some great discussion both on the first day of class and down the road in the semester.  I use surveys at other points in the class to gauge students' attitudes towards cases and see if they vary according to gender.  It won't surprise any trusts and estates teachers that male and female students differ greatly in their attitude toward In re Strittmater.  But that's really a story for another time.

I remember about fifteen years ago -- back when I was teaching administrative law -- really enjoying an article that Cass Sunstein wrote (actually co-authored, though I'd forgotten this) on a survey he conducted in his administrative law class about students' attitudes towards allocation of resources in response to risk.  (The article is by Christopher E. Houston and Sunstein, Risk Assessment, Resource Allocation, and Fairness: Evidence from Law Students 48 Journal of Legal Education 496-523 (December 1998).)  And so I was looking for that article this weekend as a sort of model for this very compact essay I'm writing.  I remembered that it was in the Journal of Legal Education, but I'd forgotten the title.  But I figured that it would have been cited a bunch and would be easy to find.  It actually didn't take long to find, thanks to the magic of westlaw, but I was surprised that it hadn't been cited much, at all -- I think only twice in westlaw's JLR file.  

I mean, I'd understand it if it were on pre-Civil War popular constitutional thought -- even more so if it were on pre-Civil War trusts and estates or landscape art and property law.  But this is Cass Sunstein -- and it's on adminstrative law and risk.  Just further evidence that you shouldn't judge an article -- even an article's utility -- solely by its citations.

Comments

[Bill Turnier]

This is somewhat similar to Marc Galanter's "Why the Haves Come Out Ahead." that artichoke is so impactful that it had an retrospective issue of Law and Society dedicated to it 25 years after its initial publication. I had heard that it was initially widely rejected by law reviews and included this in remarks I made at a panel at a Law and Society meeting in Budapest in 2001. Marc was in the audience and I asked him from the platform how many actually rejected it. He said "All of them." I asked how many he sent it to. To which he replied "All, I mean all." I asked "You mean something like 125?" He nodded his head affirmatively and remarked that he fortunately had a very understanding dean who urged him to stick with it and resubmit it. He did and as they say, "The rest is history."

If any visitors to this blog have not as yet read it, I suggest that your time doing so would be well spent and you would find that the article has a timeless nature to it which is actually somewhat sad.

[Bill Turnier]

Sorry about "artichoke" but such are the dangers of using an iPad with it's auto spell checker and not carefully proofreading. Maybe it will stimulate this hungry fir food and knowledge to read Marc's excellent article.

[Michelle Meyer]

I assumed that "that artichoke is so impactful" was a reference to an adage of which I had been previously unaware, in which a rich, complex, multi-layered argument is likened to an artichoke, perhaps somewhat like the peeling away layers of an onion metaphor. (I've not read the paper in question, so I can't say if it is in fact multi-layered -- though I'll be sure to read it now.) I confess I'm a little sorry that this was just an auto correct incident.

[Jeffrey Harrison]

Al, now you've ruined it. When Leiter or someone does a ranking of the least cited articles, this article will be in it and oodles of people will begin citing it as one of the least cited and it will fall from the rankings.

And, Bill, Artie Choke used to play sax in a 1960s modern jazz group. I thought this was a very inside joke.

[Alfred Brophy]

I think you're right, Jeff! Now this will start being cited more -- maybe people will even read it. It's actually quite an interesting article and I think shows how student surveys can be good teaching devices, as well as tell us something about attitudes about policy.

Then again, it has a ways to go to before it's in the range of Sunstein's most-cited article (which I think has more than 850 citations).