BU Law and Faculty Named Among the Most Cited for US Law Schools
Once again, Boston University School of Law (BU Law) has been ranked among the best of law schools in terms of scholarly impact. Specifically, BU Law stands at #27 among the top fifty US law faculties for scholarly impact in 2024.
Every three years, Professor Gregory Sisk and colleagues at the University of St. Thomas update a database with the numbers of citations for tenured law faculty, excluding law faculty with a primary appointment in clinical education or legal writing or a primary appointment as a university administrator or government official, at the nearly 200 accredited law schools in the United States. University of Chicago Law School Professor Brian Leiter then refines this data into a “Scholarly Impact Ranking,” which he calculates from the mean and the median of total law journal citations over the past five years, to rank the law schools ordinally. He also identifies the 10 most cited faculty at each of the top 50 law schools.
From the data on schools, Professor Leiter also produces “most cited” rankings for individual professors in different fields of law, such as constitutional law, law and privacy, law and economics, family law, legal history, corporate law & securities regulation, plus many more. Depending on the size and competitiveness of each field, Professor Leiter creates field-specific “most cited” lists of 10 to 20 faculty per field, each with an addendum that specifies “other highly cited scholars who work partly in this area.”
Five BU Law faculty members were included in Leiter’s field-specific “most cited lists.”
MOST CITED FACULTY LISTS
- BU Law is ranked #27 among the top 50 US law faculties for scholarly impact, with a mean citation count of 153 and a median of 98. The 10 most cited faculty at BU Law include Jack Beermann, Jim Fleming, Woodrow Hartzog, Keith Hylton, Linda McClain, Michael Meurer, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Jed Shugerman, Rory Van Loo, and David Webber.
Administrative/Environmental Law:
- Jack Beermann is listed as a runner-up for most cited administrative/environmental law faculty with 340 citations, just below the top 20, which ended at 350 citations.
- Angela Onwuachi-Willig (430 citations) and Linda McClain (210 citations) are noted as other highly cited scholars who work partly in family law.
- Angela Onwuachi-Willig (430 citations) is noted among other highly cited scholars who work partly in labor and employment law.
- Woodrow Hartzog is tied at #4 in law and technology faculty with 630 citations.
- Jed Shugerman is ranked #5 in most-cited legal history faculty with 380 citations.
Jessica Silbey, professor of law and associate dean for intellectual life at BU Law, explains why these scholarly impact rankings remain of great interest to law faculty. She asserts, “Writing and engaging in legal scholarship is hard. It is not rewarded in the obvious ways we think about as lawyers. . . . When legal scholarship is noted by the broader community of legal scholars and especially when it is impactful, the hard work is entirely worth it. We would do the legal research anyway – it is why we became law professors. But for the work of BU law professors to be ranked so highly is a testament to the excellence of the work and the passion with which we do it.”