Women law profs dominate new list of most-cited faculty, bucking historical pattern

By Karen Sloan

March 11 (Reuters) - A new ranking of the most-cited legal scholars in the U.S. flips the script on who is making the biggest impact, with women occupying seven of the top 10 spots on the list—more than double the number from the previous year.

The prevalence of women at the top of the annual ranking is unusual in the growing wealth of research on legal scholarship, where men typically dominate studies of whose law review articles are cited most often in the scholarly work of their peers.

The latest finding reflects the increasing number and prominence of women law professors, who now make up 49% of full-time U.S. law school faculty, according to the American Bar Association, up from 40% in 2011. Women's representation in the overall U.S. legal profession is also growing: they surpassed men in law school enrollment in 2016 and now comprise 41% of all U.S. lawyers, up from 36% a decade ago.

The new study, published this month by George Mason University law librarians Rob Willey and Melanie Knapp, looked at which scholarly articles published between 2019 and 2021 garnered the most citations in other scholarly works since their release—meaning their ideas were deemed valuable by their peers. The recent timeframe was intended to capture the most “impactful legal scholarship right now, regardless of career stage or institutional pedigree,” the authors wrote.

Knapp and Willey said in a statement on Wednesday that more research is needed to understand whether women scholars are being cited more often in recent years, or whether previous studies that focused on citations over the course of a professor's entire career obscured women's scholarly impact.

Danielle Citron, a prominent privacy expert who teaches at the University of Virginia School of Law, topped the ranking for the second time in as many years. This time she was joined by six other women in the top 10, including former chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Columbia law professor Lina Khan and criminal law professor Jocelyn Simonson at Brooklyn Law School.

The previous two iterations of Willey and Knapp’s ranking each had three women among the top 10. While more women occupy top-10 spots on this year’s list, the overall number of women in the top 100 declined slightly to 35 from 37 the previous year, according to the study, but was up from 33 on the 2023 list.

Willey and Knapp wrote that women are consistently in the minority in other rankings of the most-cited legal scholars, particularly at the top of such lists.

A 2021 study by former Yale Law librarian Fred Shapiro found just two women among the 50 most-cited legal scholars of all time—a finding he attributed to “historical scarcity” of women in the legal academy, prejudice against women law professors and the greater demands women face outside the workplace. Shapiro predicted that over time more women would join the most-cited list.

A different 2021 study found that flagship law reviews at top-20 law schools on average published twice as many articles written by men than women and that implicit biases may be a factor.

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