Brian Leiter is posting a series on the most-cited scholars from 2010 to 2014 in particular subjects (here is his list for constitutional law). So I thought I would try to calculate a list of the most-cited textualist/originalist scholars for the same period, using the same methodology (as best as I can reproduce it).
A couple of caveats: (1) I did not include anyone from the University of San Diego Law School, lest this look like a publicity stunt; (2) it's not clear who should be counted as a textualist/originalist scholar, as there are many people whose work has originalist orientations without being overtly originalist, and there are others who do some originalist work and some scholarship with other orientations; (3) I may not be able to reproduce Professor Leiter's methodology exactly; and (4) I may have forgotten someone.
For what it's worth, here is my preliminary list:
- Jack Balkin (Yale), 1720 citations
- Michael McConnell (Stanford), 1197 citations
- Randy Barnett (Georgetown), 1184 citations
- Steven Calabresi (Northwestern), 918 citations
- Lawrence Solum (Georgetown), 907 citations
- John Manning (Harvard), 846 citations
- John McGinnis (Northwestern), 758 citations
- Gary Lawson (Boston University), 695 citations
- Michael Paulsen (St. Thomas), 618 citations
- Saikrishna Prakash (Virginia), 576 citations
Runners up:
Caleb Nelson (Virginia), 570 citations; Keith Whittington (Princeton political science), 566 citations.
Highly cited scholars writing partly in the originalist/textualist field:
Richard Epstein (NYU), 2680 citations; Akhil Amar (Yale), 1747 citations; Eugene Volokh (UCLA), 1294 citations; John Yoo (Berkeley), 1260 citations.
Corrections, suggestions and other reactions are of course welcome. I'll post an update as appropriate.
Posted at 6:33 AM