Brian Leiter conducted a recent scholarly survey aimed at identifying the “ten most highly cited faculty for the period 2009 through 2013 in 11 major areas of legal scholarship: Commercial Law/Contracts/Bankruptcy; Corporate Law/Securities Regulation; Criminal Law & Procedure; Intellectual Property/Cyberlaw; International Law; Law & Economics; Law & Philosophy; Law & Social Science (excl. economics); Legal History; Public Law; and Tax. There is also an overall list of the ten most cited faculty regardless of area.”
I thought it might be useful to conduct a similar survey of election law scholars teaching in law schools. I used similar methodology to Leiter’s (the only real difference is that in the Westaw searches I included nicknames such as “Sam” given the common number of nicknames in the election law field). I welcome corrections and additions.
Note also that a number of people on this list write and are cited in other areas. For example, Sam Issacharoff is cited often for his work in civil procedure. Following Leiter, I included in this specialty listing those law professors people who appear to receive at least 75% of their citations in the election law field. [UPDATE: Leiter writes: “I suspect more than 25% of the cites to some of these folks are to non-voting rights scholarship, but I may be wrong.”] Citations rounded to the nearest 10.
Rank | Name | Institution | Total Citations | |
1 | Samuel Issacharoff | NYU | 1040 | |
2 | Rick Pildes | NYU | 920 | |
3 | Pam Karlan | Stanford (currently on leave to DOJ) | 780 | |
4 | Rick Hasen | UC Irvine | 690 | |
5 | Richard Briffault | Columbia | 620 | |
6 | Heather Gerken | Yale | 480 | |
7 | Beth Garrett | USC | 450 | |
8 | Nate Persily | Stanford | 420 | |
9 | Adam Cox | NYU | 330 | |
10 | Jim Gardner | Buffalo | 320 | |
Highly cited scholars who work partly in election law: | ||||
Jonathan Adler | Case Western | 530 | ||
Sam Bagenstos | Michigan | 430 |