Brian Leiter has been conducting a series of surveys aimed at identifying the top ten most cited faculty in a number of different fields, building toward a more comprehensive list. Brian’s surveys draw on the data from the 2015 Sisk study. This time around, like last time around, Brian did not do a survey of the election law field, I believe out of concern that many people who write in the election law field write in other areas, and he is aiming to include those who write 75% to 80% in an area to be counted as writing primarily in that field. I am not sure if all the people below would make a strict count in a 75% threshold (someone like Sam Issacharoff, for example, writes a fair bit on class actions and civil procedure). But each person on the list is someone who is strongly identified as an election law, voting rights, or law and democracy scholar by those of us in the field.
In any case, using the same methodology of the Sisk study (firstname /2 lastname with date restrictions in Westlaw “Journals and Law Reviews” database), I have created a new ranking of election law professors (here is the ranking from 2014). I have excluded our friend Beth Garrett from the survey, who tragically passed away this year. She would have ranked seventh in the survey.
Rank | Name | Institution | Total Citations | |
1 | Samuel Issacharoff | NYU | 1056 | |
2 | Richard Pildes | NYU | 926 | |
3 | Pamela Karlan | Stanford | 779 | |
4 | Richard Hasen | UC Irvine | 653 | |
5 | Richard Briffault | Columbia | 648 | |
6 | Heather Gerken | Yale | 573 | |
7 | Nathaniel Persily | Stanford | 415 | |
8 | James Gardner | Buffalo | 354 | |
9 | Michael Kang | Emory | 240 | |
10 | Bradley Smith | Capital | 215 | |