I started thinking about some of these things after reading Dean Jim Chen's "Moneylaw" blog (careful, long download time), where he opines and theorizes on how to build a good legal faculty.(We really need to address the long download time). Readers of MoneyLaw might find this comment in response particularly amusing:
By the way, aren't the "Money Law" guys the same idiots who found Iverson was the 91st best player in the NBA the year he won the MVP award and Ben Gordon was the worst player the year he won Sixth Man of the Year? Some people are so into their equations and numerical measurements that they make fools of themselves. In the legal world, we say these people have no judgment.I have no clue what that poster's talking about. But, hey, I try to maintain the ability to laugh at myself....
That's not what's motivating this post, however. The study measures publications in Hein OnLine's "Most Cited Journals." I'm interested in citations as measure of law review quality. So that led me to ask, what does Hein OnLine think are the most-cited law reviews? Here's their list:
Boston University Law Review
Business Lawyer
California Law Review
Columbia Law Review
Cornell Law Review
Duke Law Journal
Fordham Law Review
George Washington Law Review
Georgetown Law Journal
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
Harvard Law Review
Hastings Law Journal
Hofstra Law Review
Iowa Law Review
Law and Contemporary Problems
Michigan Law Review
Minnesota Law Review
New York University Law Review
North Carolina Law Review
Northwestern University Law Review
Ohio State Law Journal
Southern California Law Review
Stanford Law Review
Supreme Court Review
Texas Law Review
UCLA Law Review
University of Chicago Law Review
University of Pennsylvania Law Review
Vanderbilt Law Review
Virginia Law Review
Wisconsin Law Review
Yale Law Journal
That's a list of great law journals, no doubt. And I would be honored to publish in any of them. However, I am surprised that some of them appear on a list of the 32 most-cited journals (like Wisconsin, Hastings, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties--though perhaps the later fits on a list where citations per article is used as the measure). Moreover, ones that are well-cited are missing (like William and Mary, Notre Dame, Indiana Law Journal, Cardozo, and maybe University of Colorado). Our friend John Doyle has a terrific website that ranks journals by citations and impact.
Over at First Movers, Anthony Ciolli has also linked to the study.