Study Names Top Law Schools for Scholarly Impact; 18 Significantly Outperform US News Ranking
Yale and Harvard continue to dominate rankings of law schools based on law journal citations for their tenured faculty, but a newer law school has managed to secure the seventh spot.
The rankings by University of St. Thomas law professor Gregory Sisk and three of his Minnesota colleagues are based on mean and median law journal citations for the last five years, report Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports and TaxProf Blog. The University of California at Irvine, which opened in 2009, was ranked seventh in the new study, up from ninth place in a prior study.
Three other newer law schools that were accredited in the last two decades “have already made a scholarly impact that dramatically outpaces their present academic reputations,” the study authors write in an abstract. They are the law schools at the University of St. Thomas, Nevada-Las Vegas and Chapman.
Other law schools with a scholarly impact well above their ranking in U.S. News & World Report are Brooklyn, Cardozo, Case Western, Colorado, Florida State, George Mason, Hawaii, Hofstra, Houston, Missouri-Columbia, New York Law School, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers-Camden and Seattle.
The top five law schools for scholarly impact are:
1) Yale
2) Harvard
3) Chicago
4) Stanford
5) New York University
Yale also tops the list of top law schools by U.S. News & World Report, but there are differences in the other schools. Second on the U.S. News list is Stanford, followed by Harvard, Columbia and Chicago.
