The Sisk rankings of law schools by scholarly impact, gives more weight to mean impact than median impact (the overall scores is based on 2x the mean impact plus 1x the median impact). One reason it is interesting to look solely at median impact is that it tells us something about scholarly impact at a school: very roughly, schools that rank higher by median impact than they do in the overal impact ranking are schools with a "strong middle" of productive, impactful faculty, but not as many citation stars; by contrast, schools that rank lower by median impact than they in the overall impact ranking are schools being carried by their citation stars, as it were.
Top 25 Law Schools by Median Scholarly Impact, 2016-2020
|
Median Impact Rank |
School (overall impact rank) |
Median impact |
|
1 |
Yale University (1) |
341 |
|
2 |
University of Chicago (2) |
312 |
|
3 |
New York University (4) |
267 |
|
4 |
Harvard University (3) |
256 |
|
5 |
Columbia University (5) |
218 |
|
6 |
Stanford University (6) |
210 |
|
7 |
University of California, Berkeley (6) |
181 |
|
8 |
University of Pennsylvania (8) |
177 |
|
9 |
Duke University (12) |
171 |
|
10 |
University of California, Los Angeles (11) |
165 |
|
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (13) |
165 |
|
|
University of Virginia (9) |
164 |
|
|
Vanderbilt University (9) |
166 |
|
|
14 |
Cornell University (15) |
151 |
|
15 |
Georgetown University (17) |
144 |
|
University of Minnesota (18) |
142 |
|
|
17 |
Northwestern University (15) |
132 |
|
University of California, Irvine (14) |
133 |
|
|
University of Texas, Austin (18) |
133 |
|
|
20 |
University of Arizona (27) |
127 |
|
21 |
College of William & Mary (27) |
124 |
|
22 |
Boston University (23) |
119 |
|
George Washington University (18) |
120 |
|
|
University of Southern California (29) |
120 |
|
|
University of St. Thomas (MN) (23) |
120 |
Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…