Legal Scholarship, Citations, and the Rankings Obsession

 

I have not thought much about legal scholarship lately but a few months ago my elitist and ratings-obsessed former dean send out a memo to the faculty promoting the idea of writing things that will be cited. The reason -- think about it. It is in the air that USNews rankings may soon use citations as one of the measures in determining rankings.

This brought to mind an empirical work my coauthor, Amy Mashburn, and I did a couple of years ago. Citations were correlated at statistically significant levels with the ranking of the school from which you graduated, the ranking of the school at which you teach, and the ranking of the law review where your article was published.  Why is this? Likely because law students making publication decisions know they do not know much about law and rely on institutional authority. In fact, it is a common practice when a manuscript arrives to check where the author has published before and their citations. 

This means that citations have almost nothing to do with the quality of the work. Yet, in the rankings-obsessed world of my former dean, (who I am told also vetoes any entry level candidate who does not come from a ivy league school) quality is irrelevant. 

But maybe it does not matter that quality is all but irrelevant because law professors rarely engage in scholarship. By that I mean actually trying to discover something that advances our understand of anything. Instead they write OP-ED pieces or legal briefs that are devoted to one side of the story. That is what they were trained to do in law school.

But the whole citation based on where you went to school or are teaching gets worse -- much worse. When Mashburn and I did our study we examined what a citation really meant. Did it mean that the cite work was thought provoking, engaging, controversial, or whatever. No. Citations were almost always just for some fact the cited work cited mentioned whether or not the cited work was also just citing another work that had cited another work, none of which had actually done any legitimate research. In other words, rarely did one law professor give a hoot about what another one said. 

What this means is that professors at less than top 20 schools should probably be devoting more time to teaching and less to writing. It also means, when and if USNews starts counting citations, the ranking will not change. But, don't be surprised if raises and promotions for  law professors become dependent on number of citations. 

As an aside, Malcolm Gladwell, in his series of podcasts now has 2 devoted to the rankings. He notes that in the 70s when there was a battle between Time, Newsweek, and US News which US News was losing badly, the whole ranking thing that new rules higher education was a marking gimmick.