The Volokh Conspiracy

Wow! Congrats!

(It leads one to wonder: If the Volokh Conspirators were the pitching staff of a major league baseball team, what would its ERA be?)

The teachers are already assembled online. All you need to do is round up some students.

So when can we expect the "Volokh Conspiracy Online School of Law" to open its doors (so to speak)?

Is the (arithmetic) mean of "scholarly impact" really meaningful? There are a lot of statistics for which calculating the arithmetic mean shows nothing beyond what a clumsy grasp the calculator has of statistics. Batting averages, for one.

This suggests a whole new national obsession, that could totally monetize VC's eyeballs and perhaps create Internet 3.0, particularly in its Mobile iteration: Fantasy Law Schools.

Leiter himself has explained the problems with using citation counts as a proxy for scholarly quality.

First, there is the industrious drudge: the competent but uninspired scholar who simply churns out huge amounts of writing in his or her field. Citation practices of law reviews being what they are, the drudge quickly reaches the threshold level of visibility at which one is obliged to cite his or her work in the obligatory early footnotes of any article in that field. The work is neither particularly good, nor especially creative or groundbreaking, but it is there and everyone knows it is there and it must be duly acknowledged.

Second, there is the treatise writer, whose treatise is standardly cited because like the output of the drudge it is a recognized reference point in the literature. Unlike the drudge, the authors of leading treatises are generally very accomplished scholars, but with the devaluation of doctrinal work over the past twenty years, an outstanding treatise writer—with a few exceptions—is not necessarily highly regarded as a legal scholar.

Third, there is the “academic surfer,” who surfs the wave of the latest fad to sweep the legal academy, and thus piles up citations because law reviews, being creatures of fashion, give the fad extensive exposure. Any study counting citations, depending on when it is conducted, runs the risk of registering the "impact" of the fad in disproportion to its scholarly merit or long-term value or interest.

Fourth, there is work that is cited because it constitutes “the classic mistake”: some work is so wrong, or so bad, that everyone acknowledges it for that reason. The citation and organizational preferences of student-edited law reviews exacerbate this problem. Since the typical law-review article must first reinvent the wheel, by surveying what has come before, the classic mistake will earn an obligatory citation in article after article in a particular field, even though the point of the article may be to show how wrong the classic mistake is. True, some authors of classic mistakes may have excellent reputations; but who among us aspires to be best remembered for a "grand" mistake?

Fifth, citation tallies are skewed towards more senior faculty, so that faculties with lots of “bright young things” (as the Dean of one famous law school likes to call top young scholars) won’t fare as well, while faculties with once-productive dinosaurs will. On the other hand, by looking only at citations since 2000, we have reduced the distorting effect of this factor.

Sixth, citation studies are highly field-sensitive. Law reviews publish lots on constitutional law, and very little on tax. Scholars in the public law fields or who work in critical theory get lots of cites; scholars who work on trusts, comparative law, and general jurisprudence do not.

Actually, I did mispell my own name! Oops.

I know you were making a different point, I was just preempting the inevitable discussion of the other points.

I'm not claiming that the statistical methodology Leiter uses is "valid." however, unlike batting averages in baseball, citation counts for law faculty are actually more telling for an entire faculty than for an individual faculty member. Indeed, I'd prefer medians to means, and I'd at least be interested to know what happens when you cut off the tails on either (or both) end. It would be also interesting to see statistics for, say, the 30th percentile of faculties, to see which faculties have good average productivity but whose scholarly culture does or does not pervade the vast majority of the faculty.

Forget about citation counts - which of you has the highest comment-per-post ratio?

David Bernstein: Your third case is the one that gives me pause. As our deans begin talking about "scholarly impact" in Arts and Letters disciplines, I cannot avoid the conclusion that we will really be talking about "trend" numbers.

I am a historian, and I can assure you that a mediocre work on environmental history will do better than a stronger work on political history.

If humanities scholarship becomes this mechanistic, I think I'll go back to collecting snakes for zoos.

I'd invest.

Wait, I thought this is the Volokh School of Law. The first year curriculum:

First Amendment (3 credits)
Second Amendment (9 credits)
Fourth Amendment (3 credits)
Supreme Court Seminar (3 credits)
Cool Stuff Found on the Web (3 credits)

All I know is I've learned a lot more from reading VC than from my days at Georgetown Law. As far as I'm concerned, I already have an unofficial Volokh Conspiracy LLM.

Hey, wait a minute, you missed:

Mining court documents for funny stuff

(Part of the Common Core curriculum around here!)

I'd prefer we keep the VC as a website instead of a law school. If it were a law school, most of us couldn't get in.

Where's U.S. News &World Report when you need them?

I think that you should make a offer to Barack Obama!

Was is Leiter being cited on an otherwise respectable blog?

Now if you guys could just get the deal Opinio Juris did, with a fancy new Oxford University Press styled webpage...

But wait! Isn't this just an example of how second-rate scholars take advantage of an availability cascade!?

http://yalelawjournal.org/2006/09/20/leiter.html

You should add some dead weight to your mean score to make it more realistic. But still, that is impressive.