According to National Jurist, the University of California at Irvine, at just seven years old, has ranked 6th in a recent study on scholarly impact. The young school ranked above Columbia Law School, UCLA School of Law, and the University of California, Berkeley.
The school was created by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a highly respected legal scholar. Chemerinsky's goal was to attract top faculty and establish the school as one of the best in the country. Other faculty members whose work is highly cited include Catherine Fisk, Dan Burk, and Bryant Garth.
A law professor at the University of Chicago, Brian Leiter, created the study in 2005 to measure the scholarly impact of the top 25 law schools in the country. Gregory Sisk, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas, expanded the study three years ago.
The University of St. Thomas came in at number 39 in the study. It has been open for 16 years. At number 135 in U.S. News & World Report, the University of St. Thomas experienced the largest gap between the scholarly study and U.S. News.
Schools that had better numbers in the scholarly report than U.S. News included George Mason University School of Law (number 21 as opposed to number 42), California Western School of Law (number 25 as opposed to number 59), and Vanderbilt Law School (number 9 as opposed to number 17).
Sisk commented, "The flaw in U.S. News rankings is that they attempt to take a wide variety of information and put them all in the same overall numerical category. This study is not a substitute for that because there should be a proliferation of separate rankings for separate interests."
Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago Law School, and Stanford have frequently topped this list. New York University joined the top ranks this year as well.
Sisk remarked that he wanted to expand the study for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to see how much faculty members were influencing the legal profession, since they write for a small audience. He also felt that increasing the number of rankings available was a good move.
Sisk explained, "Like the original study, we felt it was only fair to look at works from faculty traditionally expected to do scholarship. Typically, this means clinical or legal writing professors and untenured professors were eliminated. It was very time-consuming, but we benefited from a large response rate from schools."
Source: National Jurist
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