Balkinization: The Most Cited Women in American Legal Scholarship

The Most Cited Women in American Legal Scholarship

This is my very rough attempt at a list of the most cited women in American legal scholarship today. It looks at citation counts on Westlaw between 2013 and 2017.

I apologize in advance for the ad hoc nature of the list but hope it will give some well-deserved recognition to some very fine scholars.

I used the existing citation counts from Brian Leiter's blog posts (which, in turn, rely on Greg Sisk's work). I used his latest numbers from different scholarly specialties (with a few modifications) and updated the numbers from his previous lists of most cited scholars. I also made individual searches for people I thought might not be on Brian's lists to make sure that they were included.

I rounded the numbers to the nearest 10 citations (unless the count was exactly at 5). It is important to recognize that, considered over a five year span, differences of even 50 or so citations are not really all that significant.

I tried as best I could to locate and include everyone with over 500 citations for the period between 2013 and 2017.

Please feel free to e-mail me at jackbalkin@yahoo.com if you spot omissions or errors. I will try to update the list as I discover more information.

If you like, you can perform the citation counts yourself by searching the JLR (journals and law reviews) section of Westlaw using the formula:

TE(FirstName /2 LastName) and date (aft 2012) and date (bef 2018).

If a person writes under multiple names (as I have), please use the following formula:

TE((FirstName1 or FirstName2) /2 (LastName1 or Lastname2)) and date (aft 2012) and date (bef 2018).

I would like to make this list more systematic in the future. Please contact me if you are interested in organizing the process.

	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2018
1	Reva Siegel	Yale University	1340	62
2	Michelle Alexander	Union Theological Seminary	1030	50
3	Judith Resnik	Yale University	1000	68
4	Deborah Rhode	Stanford University	980	66
5	Martha Nussbaum	University of Chicago	930	71
6	Lee Epstein	Washington University, St. Louis	840	60
7	Martha Minow	Harvard University	820	63
8	Jody Freeman	Harvard University	800	54
9	Catharine MacKinnon	University of Michigan	780	71
10	Rachel Barkow	New York University	775	47
11	Kimberle Crenshaw	Columbia University	710	59
12	Pamela Karlan	Stanford University	670	59
13	Oona Hathaway	Yale University	660	45
14	Heather Gerken	Yale University	650	49
15-T	Pamela Samuelson	University of California-Berkeley	640	69
15-T	Rochelle Dreyfuss	New York University	640	71
15-T	Carol Rose	Yale University/Arizona	640	78
18	Jill Fisch	University of Pennsylvania	625	58
19	Julie Cohen	Georgetown University	620	54
20-T	Lisa Bressman	Vanderbilt University	615	52
20-T	Gillian Metzger	Columbia University	615	53
22-T	Roberta Romano	Yale University	580	66
22-T	Abbe Gluck	Yale University	580	43
22-T	Dorothy Roberts	University of Pennsylvania	580	62
25	Christine Jolls	Yale University	560	51
26-T	Danielle Keats Citron	University of Maryland	550	49
26-T	Rebecca Tushnet	Harvard University	550	45
28	Carol Steiker	Harvard University	530	60
29-T	Robin West	Georgetown University	520	64
29-T	Elizabeth Scott	Columbia University	520	73
29-T	Martha Fineman	Emory University	520	68
32	Naomi Cahn	George Washington University	500	60

I should also add that although Kathleen M. Sullivan, the former dean of Stanford Law School, is now in full-time law practice, she has 665 citations between 2013 and 2017, which would place her 13th on the list.

Posted 1:05 PM by JB [link]