Phillips & Yoo: Faculty Citation Rankings

Who are the most-cited IP/cyberlaw profs at the top 16 law schools? James Phillips (JSP student at Berkeley) and John Yoo (Berkeley) recently posted The Cite Stuff: Inventing a Better Law Faculty Relevance Measure on SSRN. Using Brian Leiter's methodology for finding citation counts in law reviews, the authors calculated citation counts for professors at the top 16 schools in U.S. News's academic peer rankings. They calculated a per professor per year average by adding all citations for the faculty and dividing by the number of years of experience for the faculty, which they argue reduces bias against young scholars. I am no expert on citation studies, so I will just report the results that might be of the most interest to IP scholars.

Top 10 Law Professors in IP/Cyberlaw at Top-16 Schools

1. Mark Lemley (Stanford)
2. Katherine Strandburg (NYU)
3. Robert Merges (Berkeley)
4. Oskar Liivak (Cornell)
5. Julie Cohen (Georgetown)
6. Yochai Benkler (Harvard)
7. Margaret Radin (Michigan)
8. Jane Ginsburg (Columbia)
9. John Thomas (Georgetown)
10. Rebecca Eisenberg (Michigan)

Top 5 Law Schools in IP/Cyberlaw

1. Harvard (Benkler, Lessig)
2. Stanford (Lemley)
3. NYU (Strandburg)
4. Georgetown (Cohen, Thomas)
5. Michigan (Radin, Eisenberg)

Remember that these are the "top" schools only in the sense that they have one or two highly-cited faculty, and that this list would change if one of these professors makes a lateral move. For comparison, here is Leiter's list of the most cited IP/cyberlaw professors based on citations from 2000 to 2007, which includes two professors outside the top 16 law schools: Thomas McCarthy (University of San Francisco) and Dan Burk (then at Minnesota, now at Irvine).