The most-cited law review articles of all time

Michigan Law Review

Volumn 110, Issue 8, 2012, Pages 1483-1520

  Shapiro, Fred R ^a   Pearse, Michelle ^b  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b HARVARD LAW SCHOOL   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84861733964     PISSN: 00262234     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. The two previous studies were Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles, 73 Calif. L. Rev. 1540 (1985) [hereinafter Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles].
2. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles Revisited, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 751 (1996) [hereinafter Shapiro, The Most-Cited Law Review Articles Revisited].
3. J.M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson, How To Win Cites and Influence People, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 843, 843 (1996).
4. Paul M. Barrett, "Citology, " the Study of Footnotes, Sweeps the Law Schools-Thank a Yale Librarian Who Got His Start as a Child Interested in Baseball Stats, Wall St. J., Jan. 22, 1997, at A1.
5. David Rowan, Glossary for the 90s, Guardian (London), May 10, 1997, at B82.
6. Herma Hill Kay, In Defense of Footnotes, 32 Ariz. L. Rev. 419, 426 (1990) (footnote omitted).
7. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
8. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
9. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
10. And the sources referred to in those articles.
11. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
12. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
13. The more than 1,620 periodicals on HeinOnline do include hundreds of non-U.S. titles, although none of the foreign articles appear even to come close to qualifying for HeinOnline's "most-cited" rankings.
14. The search, based on lists of the most common words in the English language, was "the OR of OR a OR to OR in OR is OR that OR it OR he OR was OR for OR on OR are OR as OR with OR his OR they OR at OR be OR this OR have OR from OR one OR had OR by OR law. "
15. Some examples are Law and Human Behavior, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, and Common Market Law Review.
16. In this article, "social science journals" and "social science citations" are used as shorthand for "social science, humanities, and natural science journals" and "social science, humanities, and natural science citations, " since Web of Science indexes not only the social sciences but also the humanities and natural sciences.
17. The number of Web of Science citations from legal journals was obtained using the database's own classification of "Web of Science Categories, " one of the categories being "Law. "
18. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
19. William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner Criticize my 50 percent rule for penalizing articles having too many citations.
20. See William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, Heavily Cited Articles in Law, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 825, 825-26 (1996).
21. Their example of an article excluded from my lists by the rule is Gary S. Becker, Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, 76 J. Pol. Econ. 169 (1968). My response is that the Becker article (an excellent example of a supercited article hurt by the 50 percent rule) is primarily an economics article in an economics journal. Such papers are out of place in a law-oriented list and also difficult to catch systematically.
22. R.H. Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 3 J.L. & Econ. 1 (1960).
23. Marc Galanter, Why the "Haves" Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change, 9 Law & Soc'y Rev. 95 (1974).
24. George L. Priest & Benjamin Klein, The Selection of Disputes for Litigation, 13 J. Legal Stud. 1 (1984).
25. Stewart Macaulay, Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study, 28 Am. Soc. Rev. 55 (1963).
26. Henry G. Manne, Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control, 73 J. Pol. Econ. 110 (1965).
27. Richard A. Posner, Theories of Economic Regulation, 5 Bell J. Econ. & Mgmt. Sci. 335 (1974).
28. John Rawls, Two Concepts of Rules, 64 Phil. Rev. 3 (1955).
29. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence, 8 Signs 635 (1983).
30. Therefore, some citation totals in Table II (and also Table IV) may be different from the citation total for the same article in Table I.
31. R.H. Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 3 J.L. & Econ. 1 (1960).
32. R.H. Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 3 J.L. & Econ. 1 (1960).
33. Robert F. Engle & C.W.J. Granger, Co-Integration and Error Correction: Representation, Estimation and Testing, 55 Econometrica 251 (1987).
34. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890).
35. O.W. Holmes, The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457 (1897).
36. The Yale Book of Quotations 366 (Fred R. Shapiro ed., 2006).
37. Gerald Gunther, The Supreme Court, 1971 Term-Foreword: In Search of Evolving Doctrine on a Changing Court: A Model for a Newer Equal Protection, 86 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (1972).
38. Stewart Macaulay, Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study, 28 Am. Soc. Rev. 55 (1963).
39. Henry G. Manne, Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control, 73 J. Pol. Econ. 110 (1965).
40. Henry B. Hansmann, The Role of Nonprofit Enterprise, 89 Yale L.J. 835 (1980). The Web of Science shows that this is the most-cited law review article (defining "law review article" strictly, excluding articles in "law and" journals such as the Journal of Law and Economics) in the entire nonlegal social science literature.
41. Richard A. Posner, Sex and Reason 335 (1992).
42. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193 (1890).
43. Ian R. Macneil, Contracts: Adjustment of Long-Term Economic Relations Under Classical, Neoclassical, and Relational Contract Law, 72 Nw. U. L. Rev. 854 (1978).
44. Marc Galanter, Why the "Haves" Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change, 9 Law & Soc'y Rev. 95 (1974).
45. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, 43 Stan. L. Rev. 1241 (1991).
46. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, 43 Stan. L. Rev. 1241 (1991).
47. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Scholars, 29 J. Legal Stud. 409, 424 tbl.6 (2000).
48. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Scholars, 29 J. Legal Stud. 409, 424 tbl.6 (2000).
49. Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, 100 Yale L.J. 1131 (1991).
50. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Legal Books Published Since 1978, 29 J. Legal Stud. 397 (2000), did go beyond the articles-only focus.
51. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
52. Brian Leiter's ranking of the "top 25 law faculties in scholarly impact, 2005-2009, " has Chicago third behind Yale and Harvard and significantly ahead of fourth-place Stanford. Top 25 Law Faculties in Scholarly Impact, 2005-2009, Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings, http://www.leiterrankings.com/faculty/2010_scholarlyimpact.shtml (last visited Dec. 24, 2011).
53. Christine Jolls, Cass R. Sunstein & Richard Thaler, A Behavioral Approach to Law and Economics, 50 Stan. L. Rev. 1471 (1998).
54. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3d ed. 1996).
55. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
56. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
57. The data derived from these comparisons appears in Tables VI-XI, which can be found on First Impressions, the online companion to the Michigan Law Review, and is available at http://www.michiganlaweview.org/assets/110/8/shapiropearse_supplementaltables.pdf.
58. In addition to the Web of Science (Thomson) used by Shapiro, Elsevier offers a competitor product called Scopus. Scopus, http://www.scopus.com (last visited Feb. 9, 2012).
59. By comparison, its law coverage has not evolved beyond the scope of Web of Science. See Content Selection, SciVerse, http://www.info.sciverse.com/scopus/scopus-in-detail/contentselection (last visited Feb. 9, 2012). Law review titles are highly selective and only go back as far as the mid-1970s and sometimes as recently as the mid-1990s. As of January 10, 2011, many of the top 10 articles in Shapiro's 100 most-cited law review articles of all time are not included, most likely due to publication date.
60. See Social Sciences Citation Index, Thomson Reuters, http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/science_products/a-z/social_ sciences_citation_index/ (last visited Feb. 9, 2012) (explaining the coverage in Web of Science, specifically the Social Science Citation Index). Both Thomson and Elsevier have also released products for universities to purchase their bibliographic data with related tools to mine and report on faculty and institutional productivity.
61. Brian Kelley, Google Scholar Citations and Metadata Quality, UK Web Focus (Nov. 28, 2011, 9:26 AM), http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/google-scholarcitations-and-metadata-quality/. There has also been an independently launched project called ORCID, which is a central registry for authors to create a unique identifier and confirm their publications.
62. See ORCID, http://about.orcid.org (last visited Feb. 26, 2012).
63. Anne-Wil K. Harzing offers Publish or Perish Software with Google Scholar data for authors to compile their own metrics. Harzing. com, http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm (last visited Feb. 9, 2012).
64. See also Ann-Wil K. Harzing & Ron van der Wal, Google Scholar distribuas a New Source for Citation Analysis, 8 Ethics Sci. & Envtl. Pol. 61 (2008), available at http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esep/v8/n1/p61-73/.
65. See Péter Jascó, Google Scholar Duped and Deduped-the Aura of "Robometrics", 35 Online Info. Rev. 154 (2011), available at http://emeraldinsight.com/ journals.htm?articleid=1907378.
66. Joeran Beel & Bela Gipp, Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar's Resilience Against It, J. Electronic Pub. (Dec. 2010), http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0013.305. The same article often comes from different sources (e.g., HeinOnline and JSTOR). While these various sources for the same document are frequently "clustered" into a single entry, they do occasionally appear as separate entries.
67. Marcie Baranich, HeinOnline or Google Scholar? Why You Should Start Your Research in HeinOnline First, HeinOnline Blog (Nov. 24, 2009), http://heinonline.blogspot. com/2009/11/heinonline-or-google-scholar-why-you.html. It is very difficult to get information from Google about its source data for Google Scholar and Google Citations. Links are sometimes identified as different versions of the same content. Although Google does provide some explanation of its substantive and technical criteria, it is very difficult to discern more detailed information about the existing scope of source data for Google Scholar and Google Citations.
68. See Google Scholar Citations Help, Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com/ intl/en/scholar/citations.html (last visited Apr. 22, 2012).
69. Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters, Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html (last visited Apr. 22, 2012).
70. Some of these problems might be resolved by crowd-sourcing and author participation in Google Citations Author profiles, but that depends upon whether authors and their institutions adopt this source. See Google Scholar Citations, Google Scholar, http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html (last visited Feb. 9, 2012).
71. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
72. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
73. This was generated by searching the cited-references results. That provides only a rough estimate because some books are actually journals, while others are reprints of the journal article.
74. A search was run for the author and exact name of the article as required terms in "legal opinions from all courts" in the Advanced Search in Google Scholar. In some cases, a search for the journal publication name and its Bluebook abbreviation was used. These results are inherently inaccurate as even a cursory review indicated that searching for required terms actually yielded cases that did not seem to mention the article. This could be a reflection of recent changes in Google Advanced searching. See Google Advanced Search Showdown, Search Engine Showdown, http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/blog/2011/12/google_ advanced_showdown.shtml (last visited Feb. 9, 2012).
75. Microsoft Academic Search, http://academic.research.microsoft.com (last visited Feb. 9, 2012).
76. 2 citations." The H-Index is more commonly used in the sciences and for overall author performance, but there have been attempts to apply it to individual papers.
77. See Andras Shubert, Using the H-Index for Assessing Single Publications, 78 Scientometrics 559 (2009).
78. but see Lutz Bornmann, Hermann Schier, Werner Marx & Hans-Dieter Daniel, Does the H Index For Assessing Single Publications Really Work?, 89 Scientometrics 835 (2011) (questioning application of the H-Index to single publications in chemistry).
79. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
80. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
81. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
82. JSTOR offers this feature, as do both ProQuest and EBSCO platforms on selected databases such as EconLit and PsychInfo. Some journal publisher platforms, such as Oxford University Press, also have similar capabilities.
83. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
84. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
85. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
86. Fred R. Shapiro, The Most-Cited Articles from The Yale Law Journal, 100 Yale L.J. 1449 (1991).
87. See Law Prof. Ifill Challenges Chief Justice Roberts' Take on Academic Scholarship, ACSblog (July 5, 2011), http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/law-prof-ifillchallenges-chief-justice-roberts'-take-on-academic-scholarship (quoting Justice Roberts's commentary about legal scholarship at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference and discussing law professor Sherrilyn Ifill's reaction on the Concurring Opinions blog).
88. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Address to the Annual Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Conference (June 25, 2011), available at http://www.c-span.org/Events/Annual-Fourth-Circuit-Court-of-Appeals-Conference/10737422476-1/.
89. See also Michelle M. Harner & Jason A. Cantone, Is Legal Scholarship Out of Touch? An Empirical Analysis of the Use of Scholarship in Business Law Cases, 19 U. Miami Bus. L. Rev. 1 (2011).
90. Michael D. McClintock, The Declining Use of Legal Scholarship by Courts: An Empirical Study, 51 Okla. L. Rev. 659 (1998).
91. Deborah J. Merritt & Melanie Putnam, Judges and Scholars: Do Courts and Scholarly Journals Cite the Same Law Review Articles?, 71 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 871 (1996).
92. Lee Petherbridge & David L. Schwartz, An Empirical Assessment of the Supreme Court's Use of Legal Scholarship, Nw. U. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2012), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1884462 (finding that the Supreme Court uses legal scholarship often and disproportionately when cases are either more important or more difficult to decide).
93. David L. Schwartz & Lee Petherbridge, The Use of Legal Scholarship by the Federal Courts of Appeals: An Empirical Study, 96 Cornell L. Rev. 1345 (2011) (finding marked increase in the frequency of citation to legal scholarship in the reported opinions of the circuit courts of appeals in the last fiftynine years).
94. KeyCite indicates how an article was referenced with its "depth of treatment" star system: three stars means "discussed, " two means "cited, " and one means "mentioned. " There is also an indication of whether the article was actually quoted.
95. A search was run for the author and exact name of the article as required terms in "legal opinions from all courts" in the Advanced Search. The significance of this search is difficult to evaluate because of the ambiguity of the source data for Google court decisions.
96. In a recent paper, a law professor questions the appropriateness of legal academics' involvement in activities such as amicus briefs. Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Scholars' Briefs and the Vocation of a Law Professor (Oct. 29, 2011) (unpublished manuscript), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1959936.
97. see also Paul Horwitz, Fallon, Amicus Briefs, and the Healthcare Litigation, PrawfsBlawg (Nov. 14, 2011, 5:07 PM), http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2011/11/fallon-amicus-briefs-and-the-healthcarelitigation. html.
98. E.g., James G. Milles, Redefining Open Access for the Legal Information Market, 98 Law Libr. J. 619 (2006).
99. Ex Libris, a vendor for bibliographic utilities for libraries, recently released a "Hot Articles" mobile telephone application, which lists scholarly articles in various fields (including law) that have been "popular among researchers in recent weeks. " See Hot Articles on Your Smartphone, ExLibris, available at http://exlibrisgroup.com/category/HotArticlesMobileApps (last visited Apr. 22, 2012).
100. See James M. Donovan & Carol A. Watson, Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship, 103 Law Libr. J. 553 (2011). But see Patrick Gaulé & Nicolas Maystre, Getting Cited: Does Open Access Help?, 40 Res. Pol'y 1332 (2011).
101. But see Patrick Gaulé & Nicolas Maystre, Getting Cited: Does Open Access Help?, 40 Res. Pol'y 1332 (2011).
102. SSRN utilizes a service called "CiteReader" with ITX Corporation. Data is dependent on content and referencing and formatting in author papers coupled with some human proofreading. Algorithms are still in development. See Greg Gordon, SSRN's CiteReader Project Update, SSRN Blog (Apr. 26, 2011), http://ssrnblog.com/2011/04/26/ssrns-citereader-project-update/.
103. RePEc, http://repec.org (last visited Feb. 16, 2012).
104. The varied use of repositories makes it difficult to assess the meaning of a single repository's download count when the same content is available in multiple places. A project called PIRUS2 standardizes and potentially aggregates metrics from a variety of sources. PIRUS2 Project, http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/ (last visited Feb. 16, 2012). It remains to be seen if this project will eventually help provide some "ubermetric" for clicks or downloads that might be a more holistic representation of the popularity of the same paper across repositories on the internet.
105. Daniel J. Solove, "I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, 44 San Diego L. Rev. 745 (2007).
106. See Brian Leiter, Why Blogs Are Bad for Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 53, 54 (2006), http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket-part/scholarship/ why-blogs-are-bad-for-legal-scholarship/ ("A blogspheric 'buzz' is one thing, of course, and real scholarly impact is another.").
107. Michael A. Mogill, Academic TROS: How to Prevail in the Court of Public Opinion, 27 N.M. L. Rev. 473 (1997).
108. Mendeley allows users to create profiles and share papers and just started offering institutional editions. See Mendeley, http://www.mendeley.com (last visited Apr. 22, 2012).
109. See Academia. edu, http://academia.edu (last visited Apr. 22, 2012). Google Citations and Microsoft Academic are also offering profiles.
110. See Google Scholar Citations, http://scholar.google.com/citations/ (last visited Apr. 22, 2012).
111. What Is Microsoft Academic Search?, http://academic.research.microsoft.com/About/Help.htm (last visited Apr. 23, 2012). Open Scholar is an open-source solution that institutions may adopt.
112. See OpenScholar, http://openscholar.harvard.edu/ (last visited Apr. 22, 2012).
113. A recent editorial article from the medical research area suggests that highly tweeted scholarship leads to increased citation. Gunther Eysenbach, Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact, 13 J. Med. Internet Res. e123 (2011), available at http://www.jmir.org/ 2011/4/e123/.
114. see also Altmetrics: About, Altmetrics, http://altmetrics.org/about (last visited Feb. 16, 2012) (new project in the sciences for "the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing, and informing scholarship"). One project for tracking the scholarly work on the web, Total-Impact, recently received a a grant totaling $125,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. News Release, UNC School of Information and Library Science, Jason Priem, SILS Ph.D. Student, and Co-PI Heather Piwowar, Receive $125K Grant to Track the Impact of Scholarly Work on the Web (Apr. 5, 2012), available at http://sils.unc. edu/news/2012/priem-sloan. The principal investigators, Jason Sloan and Heather Piwowar, are intending to target SSRN and other law-related sources as they use the grant money to expand their project. E-mail from Heather Piwowar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Nat'l Evolutionary Synthesis Ctr., to Michelle Pearse (Apr. 23, 2012, 01:14 AM EST) (on file with authors).
115. E.g., The Post: Good Scholarship from the Internet, 1 Post 367 (2011), http:// journaloflaw.us/5%20The%20Post/The%20Post%20home.html (dedicated to identifying the best legal blogging). The Post does not claim to elevate legal blogging to the status of full articles, but recognizes its value.
116. E.g., Colin Miller, Submission Guide for Online Law Review Supplements, Version 5.0 (Aug. 5, 2011) (unpublished manuscript), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/ papers.cfm?abstract_id=1410093 (listing thirty-six online companions to law reviews).
117. Email from Brian Leiter, Professor of Law, U. of Chi. Law Sch., to Fred Shapiro, Assoc. Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law Sch. (Jan. 2, 2012 16:22 EST) (on file with author). (Hypothesizing that "blogs have been bad for legal scholarship, leading to increased visibility for mediocre scholars and half-baked ideas and to a dumbing down of standards and judgments, " but suggesting that first-rate scholars entering the blogosphere and a shift to peer-review publishing may ameliorate these negative effects). Many of the law reviews listed in Table V have been practicing some form of peer or faculty review.
118. See Peer Review at Student-Edited Journals: Best Practices?, PrawfsBlawg (Aug. 11, 2011, 2:25 PM), http://prawfsblawg.blogs. com/prawfsblawg/2011/08/peer-review-at-student-edited-journals-best-practices.html.
119. see also PRSM: Peer Reviewed Scholarship Marketplace, http://www.legalpeerreview.org (last visited Feb. 26, 2012).
120. See Symposium, The Future of Legal Education, 96 Iowa L. Rev. 1449 (2011).
121. Karen Sloan, AALS Hears Words of Caution from Departing Dean, Nat'l L.J. (Jan. 5, 2012), http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202537486631.
122. Karen Sloan, A Prescription for Law Schools: Go Back to the Basics, Return to 'Terra Firma', Nat'l L.J. (Jan. 6, 2012), http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202537684344.
123. See Moira Herbst, ABA Committee Considers Dropping Tenure-Policy Requirement, Thomson Reuters News & Insight (Nov. 16, 2011), http://newsandinsight. thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2011/11_-_November/ABA_committee_considers_dropping_ tenure-policy_requirement/. See generally Am. Bar Assoc. Section of Legal Educ. and Admissions to the Bar, Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools (2011-12 ed., 2011). Ken Hirch of University of Cincinnati College of Law has also questioned just how much alternative metrics like download counts are considered in tenure guidelines.
124. See David Segal, What They Don't Teach Law Students: Lawyering, N.Y. Times, Nov. 20, 2011, at A1, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-lawschool-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html (commenting on lack of practical instruction in legal education and significantly commenting on legal scholarship). This article was highly criticized in the blogosphere.
125. See Orin Kerr, What the NYT Article on Law Schools Gets Right, Volokh Conspiracy (Nov. 20, 2011), http://volokh.com/2011/11/20/what-the-nyt-article-onlaw-schools-gets-right/.
126. Karen Sloan, Legal Scholarship Carries a High Price Tag, Nat'l L.J. (Apr. 20, 2011), http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202490888822.
127. For a prescient discussion of the future of law school rankings, see Symposium, The Next Generation of Law School Rankings, 81 Ind. L.J. 1 (2006).