The 2015 survey of U.S. law faculty scholarly impact (inspired by Brian Leiter and now conducted by a team at St. Thomas Law School headed by Gregory Sisk) has been published. USD Law School is tied for 35th (looking quickly at the numbers I'm not sure why we're not tied for 39th, but I won't argue). Here is the full study, and here is Brian Leiter's overview of the top 40. As Professor Sisk et al. explain,
This study explores the scholarly impact of law faculties, ranking the top third of ABA-accredited law schools. Refined by Professor Brian Leiter, the “Scholarly Impact Score” for a law faculty is calculated from the mean and the median of total law journal citations over the past five years to the work of tenured members of that law faculty. In addition to a school-by-school ranking, we report the mean, median, and weighted score, along with a listing of the tenured law faculty members at each ranked law school with the ten highest individual citation counts.
What does this have to do with originalism? As the summary above notes, the survey reports for each school the ten faculty with the highest citation count. USD's top ten includes five members of the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism.
A quick scan of the top-cited professors at other schools shows many well-known originalist-oriented scholars, including (and no doubt I'm leaving some out): Akhil Amar and Jack Balkin at Yale, Richard Epstein at NYU, Michael McConnell at Stanford, John Yoo at Berkeley, Steve Calabresi and John McGinnis at Northwestern, Eugene Volokh at UCLA, Randy Barnett and Larry Solum at Georgetown, Caleb Nelson and Sai Prakash at Virginia, Brad Clark at GW, Nelson Lund and Ilya Somin at George Mason, Gary Lawson at BU, AJ Bellia and Richard Garnett at Notre Dame, Kurt Lash at Illinois, Michael Perry at Emory, and Michael Paulsen at St. Thomas.
Congratulations to all, and thanks especially to our Dean, Stephen Ferruolo, for his generous support of the Center and of all scholarship at USD.
Posted at 6:07 AM