MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 31:  Just to be clear, this ‘update’ did not do new citation counts, but used the citation data from July 2007, but adjusted the results to reflect faculty moves in the interim (plus eliminating the untenured faculty, which was the single most frequent criticism of the earlier approach).  I hope to conduct a new scholarly impact study in summer 2009.

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This is a rough updating of the 2007 study, taking account of faculty moves, retirements, and deaths since then, plus eliminating untenured faculty, whom many readers complained last year can not be expected to have high citation counts and so should be excluded.  Here are the twenty law faculties (based on 2008-09 affiliations) who have the most scholarly impact (based on the data collected last year).  The mean per capita impact of the tenured faculty is in the first set of parentheses.  In the second set, I list those select faculty who had over 2,000 citations since the year 2000 (those over 70 are marked with an *). 

1.  Yale University (mean of 810) (Bruce Ackerman, Akhil Amar, William Eskridge)

2.  Stanford University (mean of 760) (Mark Lemley, Lawrence Lessig, Deborah Rhode, Kathleen Sullivan)

3.  Harvard University (mean of 700) (Cass Sunstein, Laurence Tribe, Mark Tushnet)

4.  University of Chicago (mean of 670) (Richard Epstein, Eric Posner)

5.  New York University (mean of 450) (*Ronald Dworkin)

5.  University of California, Berkeley (mean of 450) (Daniel Farber)

7.  Columbia University (mean of 430) (John Coffee)

8.  Duke University (mean of 340)

9.  University of Michigan (mean of 330)

10. Northwestern University (mean of 320)

11. Cornell University (mean of 300)

11. Vanderbilt University (mean of 300)

13. University of California, Los Angeles (mean of 290)

13. University of Texas, Austin (mean of 290)

15. Georgetown University (mean of 270)

16. University of Pennsylvania (mean of 260)

17. University of Virginia (mean of 250)

18. University of Illinois (mean of 240)

19. George Washington University (mean of 220)

20.  University of Minnesota (mean of 200)

(I’ve not included Irvine here, because the faculty is so small as of yet, meaning Chemerinsky’s huge citation count alone would be enough to get them into the top 20 even if Burk, Menkel-Meadow, and others did not have substantial numbers of citations as well.  But I would guess Irvine is solidly on track to be in the top twenty in terms of "scholarly impact.")