The folks at Washington & Lee have a new study measuring the impact of articles published in law reviews based on the number of citations per article published. (For their earlier results, go here.) Here’s how the journals rank (with citations per article in parentheses):

1. Columbia Law Review (13.18)
2. Yale Law Journal (12.91)
3. Stanford Law Review (12.09)
4. Harvard Law Review (11.79)
5. Cornell Law Review (11.73)
6. California Law Review (Berkeley) (10.99)
7. N.Y.U. Law Review (10.91)
8. Virginia Law Review (10.74)
9. Georgetown Law Journal (10.73)
10. University of Pennsylvania Law Review (10.51)
11. Northwestern University Law Review (10.35)
12. UCLA Law Review (10.30)
13. Minnesota Law Review (9.75)
14. Duke Law Journal (9.41)
15. University of Chicago Law Review (9.30)
16. Vanderbilt Law Review (8.62)
17. Texas Law Review (8.46)
18. Southern California Law Review (7.83)
19. Iowa Law Review (7.34)
20. University of Illinois Law Review (7.24)
21. William & Mary Law Review (7.24)
22. Michigan Law Review (6.98)
23. North Carolina Law Review (6.93)
24. Arizona Law Review (6.83)
25. Indiana Law Journal (6.81)

Many odd results here (e.g., Michigan 22nd?), but I haven’t studied the methodology carefully enough to know what explains them.

UPDATE: A couple of readers point out that Michigan Law Review runs a book review issue each year, with dozens of reviews in it. Since book reviews are cited to less often than articles, this would depress their score. That seems a plausible explanation in the case of Michigan. What about the other anomalies (on the low and high ends): e.g., Cornell? Chicago? Texas? (My hypothesis on Texas is that Texas Law Review is one of the few elite law reviews that will still publish traditional doctrinal pieces, which won’t, of course, be cited as much because of the interdisciplinary turn in legal education. But this wouldn’t explain Chicago.)