The Most-Cited Legal Scholars Revisited

This Essay presents a list of the fifty most-cited legal scholars of all time, in-tending to spotlight individuals who have had a very notable impact on legal thought and institutions. Because citation counting favors scholars who have had long careers, I supplement the main listing with a ranking of the most-cited younger legal scholars. In addition, I include five specialized lists: most-cited international law scholars, most-cited corporate law scholars, most-cited scholars of critical race theory and feminist jurisprudence, most-cited public law scholars, and most-cited scholars of law and social science. (For those readers who cannot wait to see the actual lists, Tables 1–7 are on pages 8–11.) The utility of citation totals as indicators of scholarly quality or even of scholarly influence is controversial, but they have been shown to correlate positively with informed subjective assessments. The danger in relying on such counts is that, because they are so convenient, they will be disproportionately relied upon relative to their actual probative value. There are a number of significant biases in citation statistics, and there are a variety of pitfalls that should be avoided in at-tempting to compile meaningful citation data. I will describe these biases and pit-falls when I explain the derivation and methodology of my study. It is my hope that I have produced tabulations that, although they clearly have imperfections, can serve as examples of careful analysis. Such examples are sorely needed after flawed proposed “scholarly impact rankings” by the U.S. News and World Report threatened to have a harmful effect on legal education

The Quotable Jurist

Christopher A. Anzalone, The Encyclopedia of Supreme Court Quotations. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Pp. xiv, 395. $83.95. Full Disclosure: I edited The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. The book being reviewed, Encyclopedia of Supreme Court Quotations by Christopher A. Anzalone, might be considered a work competing with my own volume, so readers should take what I have to say with a grain of salt. Legal quotation is a somewhat oxymoronic concept when applied to case law. Judicial discourse is long-winded, and the need for precision or pseudo-precision is usually valued far more highly than literary qualities are by judicial writers. Looking at American sources, most quotable authors on law-related subjects have not been judges but rather academics (Karl Llewellyn, Fred Rodell, Alexander Bickel, John Chipman Gray), statesmen (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Daniel Webster), literary figures (H.L. Mencken, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville), or satirists (Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Will Rogers, Finley Peter Dunne). Among judges, four individuals (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Robert Jackson, Learned Hand, and Benjamin Cardozo) account for a very high percentage of all quotable passages in opinions, and if these four were excluded, the landscape would be an extremely barren one. The paucity of good judicial quotes has become more pronounced in recent decades. Some of the explanation lies in the fact that the last of the Big Four died in 1961. Some lies in the tendency of recent opinions to be ghost-written by clerks who are unlikely to insert bold or humorous pronouncements in their boss\u27s decisions. Some may lie in a general decline of modern art and thought. Conservative court-watchers champion Antonin Scalia as a titan of eloquence on the contemporary United States Supreme Court, but I believe that they are influenced by partisanship and today\u27s greatly lowered standards. Consider this quip, widely considered to be one of Scalia\u27s best: Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep\u27s clothing.... But this wolf comes as a wolf. Not exactly one for the ages, in my view