Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Fourteenth Before Fifty

In Brian Leiter’s latest rankings of the most cited law faculty in Business Law, I ranked 14th. I’m also the only professor in the top 20 under the age of 50, which strikes me as significant given Leiter’s comment that “the lists are dominated by faculty in their 50s and 60s.” Of course, I’m not much under 50, but even so.... (BTW, Leiter lists my age as 49, but I’m still 48 and will remain so until December 11th. (Presents welcome.) As 50 gets closer, I get more insistent on things like 1/12th of a year.)

Kudos also go out to my friends and UCLAW colleagues Lynn Stout and Lynn LoPucki, who ranked 16th and 17th respectively.

Update: My buddy Gordon Smith writes:

Brian Leiter’s law faculty citation analysis is meeting plenty of resistance, to which Brian ably responds. As usual, Paul Caron has all of the links, including a link to a paper that Paul and Bernie Black wrote about using SSRN to rank law schools. According to Paul and Bernie, “citation counts are a respectable proxy for article quality, and correlate reasonably well with other measures.” But, of course, “citation counts have limitations,” which Paul summarizes in some handy bullet points on his blog. In looking at Brian’s rankings in the area of business law, the most obvious “limitation”—if you want to think of it that way—is the following:

Dynamism. Cumulative citation counts favor more senior faculty and emphasize older work that accumulates citations over time.

That’s inherent in counting citations, which typically start to appear in large numbers only years after an article is published. Of course, this is why Steve Bainbridge can crow about being the only person under 50 among the top 20 most cited faculty in business law.

Crow? ”To exult loudly, as over another’s defeat; boast”? Moi? Nope. As Will Sonnett used to say, “No brag… just fact.”