Top Cited Professional Responsibility/Legal Profession Scholars

Over the summer, I read Brian Leiter’s newest study of the most cited U.S. legal scholars in a number of fields.  It’s a useful resource, but unlike Brian’s 2007 study, it omits a list of professional responsibility scholars.  As the 2014 chair of the AALS Professional Responsibility Section, I thought it might be useful to fill the gap in Brian’s work by conducting a citation study of our field.  Or more accurately, I asked the librarians at my school (Suffolk University Law School) whether they would be willing to do it.  I am grateful that they agreed, and I’m even more grateful that they didn’t change their minds after learning that the Section has over 800 members whose citations needed to be analyzed.  I owe special thanks to Amber Ahearn (a 2L and intern in Suffolk’s Reference Department), Diane D’Angelo, Rick Buckingham, Ellen Delaney, Jeanie Fallon, Susan Sweetgall, and Ron Wheeler for taking on this massive project.   

Any study of this sort comes with numerous provisos.  (Brian Leiter has assembled a nice list here.)  For me, one important cautionary note is that a citation study is only one measure of a scholar’s contribution to a field.  For example, professional responsibility scholars engage in law reform efforts (e.g., for the ABA and at the state level).  They help bar associations draft ethics opinions.  They work with the NCBE on MBE questions.  They work as expert witnesses in cases of national interest.  They write bar columns and serve as presenters in ethics-related CLE programs.  They run centers or institutes related to the legal profession or legal ethics.  They organize programs for practitioners and scholars in the field.  They mentor younger scholars by reading and commenting on their work.  And perhaps most importantly, they teach impactful PR courses that have a positive effect on students’ professional development.  In short, this study captures only one way a PR scholar makes a valuable contribution. 

Second, the study was conducted by relying on the names of people in the AALS Professional Responsibility Section.  Although the Section’s membership list has an enormous number of names, the list is nevertheless underinclusive.  I happened to uncover one person who is not a Section member and needed to be added to one of the lists.  If I have missed anyone else, please let me know.

Third, and conversely, there are many people in the PR Section who have citation counts that would have qualified them for inclusion on one or more of the lists below, but they do not appear to write primarily (or at all) in the field of PR.  (Some people are members of the Section because they teach in the area, but don’t write in it.)  I tried to be inclusive when making these judgments, but there is necessarily some subjectivity involved when determining what counts as a professional responsibility article.  So here’s what I did.  For each scholar who had enough citations to qualify for one of the lists below, I sorted the scholar’s articles according to the “most cited” function within the JLR database.  I then looked at the scholar’s 10 most cited works and included any scholar who had 6 or more articles that were primarily about professional responsibility, the law governing lawyers, or the legal profession.  In a few instances, I also counted any significant books in the field that are not captured in a list of the scholar’s law review articles.  In many cases, scholars had a mix of PR scholarship and writings in another field (between 2 and 5 articles among the 10 most cited).  These scholars are separately ranked in a list of people who write in the PR field, but have significant scholarship in a different area as well.  Again, there is some subjectivity involved in making these determinations, so if you feel I have overlooked or mischaracterized anyone’s work, please let me know.  The list is a draft, and I’m happy to modify it.

Fourth, a citation study tends to favor seasoned scholars who have been in the field for a long time and have a large body of work to cite.  We tried to compensate for this effect by looking at how often scholars were cited over only the last five years. This limitation ensured that we focused on scholarship that has had recent relevance in the literature.  Brian Leiter uses a similar method.

Even with this time constraint, citation studies still tend to favor senior scholars who have had enough time to write a large number of pieces.  For this reason, I created a separate list of top-cited scholars who are still relatively junior in their careers.  Of course, any definition of “relatively junior” is going to be problematic.  Age is one possible metric.  Years in academia is another.  The latter tends to be difficult to calculate and has many ambiguities (e.g., post-graduate fellowships and years spent pursuing a Ph.D), so I went with the more objective and easily identifiable metric of age.  One can debate what the age cutoff should be to qualify as “relatively junior,” but I went with 45 years old.  People in this group will have been around long enough to have accumulated citations, but typically will be early enough in their careers to have difficulty competing with more senior people in terms of citation counts.  Brian Leiter’s most recent study bears this out; only 16 scholars out of roughly 170 on his list were 45 years old or younger.  The same was roughly true in our field; only two people (Scott Cummings and Brad Wendel) were 45 or younger and among the top 15 cited scholars in professional responsibility.  Having said all of that, I encourage you to take the arbitrary age cut off with a grain of salt, both because academic careers vary widely in terms of when they begin and because this cut off happens to favor me personally.  I would have been too old to qualify for an “under 40” list and would have ranked lower in an “under 50” list.

Fifth, I focused only on living scholars.  Among other reasons, it is hard to ensure a comprehensive search of deceased PR scholars.  That said, I am willing to revisit that decision if people are willing to help me identify appropriate people to add to the list.  For example, one obvious addition would be Fred Zacharias, who would have come in at number 8 on the main list, with 458 citations in the last five years.

Finally, one methodological note.  Citations were assessed using a date restriction of da(aft 08/01/2009 and bef 08/01/2014) in Westlaw’s JLR database.  Each scholar’s name was searched using the author’s first name within two words of the author’s last name.  The results were reviewed to ensure that they accurately captured the scholar in question.  Adjustments were made using Brian Leiter’s methodology if false positives were found.

In the end, I’m hopeful that this study will accomplish a few goals.  First, I think it helps to demonstrate the vibrancy of PR scholarship and how often top scholars’ work is cited.  Second, I hope it acknowledges some senior scholars whose work has been especially important to our field as well as some junior scholars who are committed to writing in the area.  And finally, by highlighting how often PR scholarship is cited, I hope it will encourage academics in all fields to take PR scholarship more seriously.  For quite some time, PR scholarship was considered a backwater in legal academia (and this perception still exists in some quarters), but my hope is that this type of list will help spread the word about the interesting and useful work in our field.   

Most Cited Faculty Who Write Predominantly about Professional Responsibility/the Legal Profession (citations over last five years)

1	Deborah L. Rhode	Stanford Law School	1134
2	David Luban	Georgetown Law	969
3	Geoffrey Hazard	Penn Law (Emeritus)	719
4	William H. Simon	Columbia Law School	685
5	Carrie J. Menkel-Meadow	University of California, Irvine School of Law	627
6	Bruce A. Green	Fordham University School of Law	560
7	David B. Wilkins	Harvard Law School	502
8	Scott Cummings	UCLA Law School	382
9	Peter Joy	Washington University School of Law	380
10	Stephen Gillers	New York University School of Law	339
11	Monroe H. Freedman	Hofstra University School of Law	336
12	Richard W. Painter	University of Minnesota Law School	301
13	Roger C. Cramton	Cornell Law School	299
14	Milton C. Regan, Jr.	Georgetown University Law Center	284
15	W. Bradley Wendel	Cornell Law School	281

 

Most Cited Faculty Whose Scholarship is Partially in Professional Responsibility or the Legal Profession (citations over last 5 years)

1	Ronald D. Rotunda	Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law	629
2	Bryant Garth	U.C. Irvine	515
3	Anthony Kronman	Yale Law School	501
4	Richard Abel	UCLA Law School	483
5	Gillian Hadfield	USC Gould School of Law	415

 

Most Cited “Junior” Faculty Who Write Predominantly about Professional Responsibility or the Legal Profession (citations over last five years)

1	Scott Cummings	UCLA Law School	382
2	W. Bradley Wendel	Cornell Law School	281
3	Benjamin Barton	University of Tennessee	225
4	Eli Wald	University of Denver	211
5	Norman Spaulding	Stanford Law School	169
6	Robert Vischer	University of St. Thomas	167
7	Andrew Perlman	Suffolk University Law School	117
8	Erica Hashimoto	University of Georgia	110
9	Renee Knake	Michigan State College of Law	109

 

Most Cited “Junior” Faculty Whose Scholarship is Partially in Professional Responsibility or the Legal Profession (citations over last 5 years)

1	Alafair Burke	Hofstra Law School	233
2	Daniel Markovits	Yale Law School	209
3	Alex B. Long	University of Tennessee	206
4	Douglas G. NeJaime	U.C. Irvine	201
5	Cassandra B. Robertson	Case Western Reserve	195