The latest Sisk et al study of scholarly impact and the work of Brian Leiter on scholarly rankings considers the scholarly impact of law school faculty based upon citations in law reviews. (I recently wrote about how my young law school, UCI Law, recent ranked 12 in these rankings.)
Brian has also done some rankings of scholars in particular subject areas. Brian did not do a survey of the election law field during the last round of these rankings, 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, I used the same methodology as the latest Sisk study [TE(firstname /2 lastname) and date(aft 2012) and date(bef 2018) in Westlaw “Journals and Law Reviews” database—the TE qualifier excludes mentions in the author * footnote], but looked only at scholars who write significantly in election law.
I have created a new ranking of election law professors of the 2013-2017 period (inclusive):
Rank | Name | Institution | Total citations |
1 | Samuel Issacharoff | NYU | 950 |
2 | Richard Pildes | NYU | 898 |
3 | Richard Hasen | UC Irvine | 708 |
4 | Pamela Karlan | Stanford | 656 |
5 | Heather Gerken | Yale | 654 |
6 | Richard Briffault | Columbia | 570 |
7 | Nathaniel Persily | Stanford | 395 |
8 | James Gardner | Buffalo | 275 |
9 | Michael Kang | Northwestern | 252 |
10 | Daniel Tokaji | Ohio State | 227 |
For those interested here is the 2016 ranking and here is the ranking from 2014.