Law Commons^™

Total Scholarly Impact: Law Professors Citations, Michael P. Vandenbergh, J. B. Ruhl, Sarah Dunaway

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this article, we demonstrate that the citation counts and other author information available through the Web of Science database has made non-law citations possible to assemble and assess in a manner similar to the Sisk et al. methodology and the Hein legal citation study by Paul J. Heald and Ted Sichelman. A true apples-to-apples comparison, however, is not possible at this time given differences in the respective databases and search engines, as we explain in more detail in Part II.

Nevertheless, our study does serve as a demonstration project, showing that, with additional refinement of databases and search capacities, …

Topic Modeling The President: Conventional And Computational Methods, J.B. Ruhl, John Nay, Jonathan Gilligan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Legal and policy scholars modeling direct actions into substantive topic classifications thus far have not employed computational methods. To compare the results of their conventional modeling methods with the computational method, we generated computational topic models of all direct actions over time periods other scholars have studied using conventional methods, and did the same for a case study of environmental-policy direct actions. Our computational model of all direct actions closely matched one of the two comprehensive empirical models developed using conventional methods. By contrast, our environmental-case-study model differed markedly from the only empirical topic model of environmental-policy direct actions using …

Debate, Christopher Serkin, Richard Primus, Kevin M. Stack, Nelson Tebbe

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In 1890, Louis Brandeis wrote The Right to Privacy. Within a matter of years, the courts began adopting his theory, creating a newly articulated legal right. This article likely represented the high-water mark of legal academia in terms of real world impact. In recent years, the academy has lost much of its relevance. Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed academic work, suggesting that legal scholarship has become esoteric and irrelevant. This should not be the case. The quality of legal scholars is higher than it has ever been—young scholars now often enter the academy with doctoral degrees in related fields. Likewise, technology …

After The Override: An Empirical Analysis Of Shadow Precedent, Brian Broughman, Deborah A. Widiss

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Congressional overrides of prior judicial interpretations of statutory language are typically defined as equivalent to judicial overrulings, and they are presumed to play a central role in maintaining legislative supremacy. Our study is the first to empirically test these assumptions. Using a differences-in-differences research design, we find that citation levels decrease far less after legislative overrides than after judicial overrulings. This pattern holds true even when controlling for depth of the superseding event or considering only the specific proposition that was superseded. Moreover, contrary to what one might expect, citation levels decrease more quickly after restorative overrides—-in which Congress repudiates …

Fighting Legal Innumeracy, Edward K. Cheng

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

An old joke quips that lawyers go to law school precisely because they never liked math or were never good at math – and that therefore medical school (or these days, Wall Street) was not an option. While this tired joke may have a kernel of truth, I want to suggest that we should be very wary of internalizing it. Numeracy is a fundamental skill for any intelligent, engaged participant in society, and we lawyers ignore it at our peril. The term “innumeracy” was coined by Douglas Hofstadter in a 1982 article in Scientific American and perhaps made famous by …

A Normalized Scoring Model For Law School Competitions, Edward K. Cheng, Scott J. Farmer

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Although the focus in this Article is moot court scoring, one can envision many other instances of law school assessment in which such a normalization problem arises. Law review competitions also involve different sets of graders, whose subjective determinations must be reasonably commensurate to make fair comparisons. Even more intriguing, although presenting a more complicated problem, law school grades suffer the same normalization concern. Courses feature material with different degrees of difficulty, attract different pools of students, and are taught by different instructors. Yet, class rank and graduation honors are ultimately calculated under the assumption that all grades are commensurate. …

A Derivatives Market In Legal Academia, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Building on the success of derivatives markets in the financial arena, I show how similar markets can be used to hedge risk in legal academia. Prudent use of these markets will generate cash, mitigate errors in hiring, and increase the academic prestige of law schools. In short, they can do for legal academia what they have already done to the financial world.

Mr. Sunstein's Neighborhood: Won't You Be Our Co-Author?, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship (11 Green Bag 2d 19 (2007)) we began the study of the collaboration network in legal academia. We concluded that the central figure in the network was Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School and proceeded to catalogue all of his myriad co-authors (so-called Sunstein 1's) and their co-authors (Sunstein 2's). In this small note we update that catalogue as of August 2008 and take the opportunity to reflect on this project and its methodology.

Sunstein1s And 2s, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, we began the study of the legal academy's collaboration network. When mathematicians discuss the nature of collaboration in their field they focus on the most influential collaborator in the discipline-- Paul Erdos, the peripatetic Hungarian mathematician who authored over 1500 papers with over 450 different collaborators before his death in 1996. They introduced the concept of the Erdos Number, which is the number of degrees of separation between a mathematician and Erdos.

Six Degrees Of Cass Sunstein, Tracey E. George, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means …

Six Degrees Of Cass Sunstein, Paul H. Edelman, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means …

An Empirical Study Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Empirical legal scholarship is arguably the most significant emerging intellectual movement. Empirical legal scholarship (ELS), as the term is generally used in law schools, refers to a specific type of empirical research: a model-based approach coupled with a quantitative method. This paper ranks law schools based on their place in the ELS movement and offers an essential ranking framework that can be adopted for other intellectual movements. A revised version of the paper was posted on October 11. The updated tables reflect additional data.

Joining Forces: The Role Of Collaboration In The Development Of Legal Thought, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For every reason to believe that collaboration has been influential... there is a countervailing reason to believe that it has played a minor role in the evolution of legal thought. It may be easy to bring to mind a handful of prominent collaborations, but most law review articles seem to be written by one author (notwithstanding their lengthy acknowledgment footnotes, suggesting that even single-author works are shaped by the insights and input of multiple scholars). And while it is true that legal scholars often collaborate on their practically oriented works, scholarly articles might not be well suited to collaboration.

Joining Forces: The Role Of Collaboration In The Development Of Legal Thought, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

For every reason to believe that collaboration has been influential... there is a countervailing reason to believe that it has played a minor role in the evolution of legal thought. It may be easy to bring to mind a handful of prominent collaborations, but most law review articles seem to be written by one author (notwithstanding their lengthy acknowledgment footnotes, suggesting that even single-author works are shaped by the insights and input of multiple scholars). And while it is true that legal scholars often collaborate on their practically oriented works, scholarly articles might not be well suited to collaboration.

In Defense Of Author Prominence: A Reply To Crespi And Korobkin, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

We thank Greg Crespil and Russell Korobkin for their provocative responses to our author-prominence ranking of specialized law reviews. Crespi provides a thoughtful critique of the methodology we employ and the results we obtained. Korobkin shares some of Crespi's concerns, but he focuses his critique on the potential implications of our rankings (and rankings more generally). In this reply, we briefly address the more significant criticisms each of them raises.

An Empirical Evaluation Of Specialized Law Reviews, Chris Guthrie, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The sudden, rapid, and widespread increase in the number of specialized law reviews has attracted relatively little scholarly attention even though it is the most significant development in legal academic publishing in the second half of the twentieth century. As a consequence, there is a dearth of information about the proliferation, significance, and status of specialized reviews. In this Article, we attempt to fill this information gap by documenting the rise of the specialized review and by providing an empirical ranking of the top 100 specialized reviews.

An Empirical Evaluation Of Specialized Law Reviews, Tracey E. George, Chris Guthrie

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

The sudden, rapid, and widespread increase in the number of specialized law reviews has attracted relatively little scholarly attention even though it is the most significant development in legal academic publishing in the second half of the twentieth century. As a consequence, there is a dearth of information about the proliferation, significance, and status of specialized reviews. In this Article, we attempt to fill this information gap by documenting the rise of the specialized review and by providing an empirical ranking of the top 100 specialized reviews.

A Tour Of Mistakes, Paul H. Edelman

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In these pages, Steven Lubet recently reviewed A Tour of the Calculus, by David Berlinski. Inspired by both the beauty of calculus and Berlinski's description of it, Lubet waxes poetic on the many parallels between the law and calculus. It is completely understandable--even admirable that one might be led to ruminations on the relationship between calculus and one's own discipline. There is little doubt that the subject of calculus stands as one of the great intellectual feats of Western thought. It has had profound implications for physics, engineering, economics and many other disciplines-so why not law? Alas, these philosophical musings …