Women Scarce Among Most Cited Legal Scholars

I'm not surprised that women are very underrepresented among the most cited legal scholars, but I am surprised that it is so extreme.

Retired federal appellate judge and law professor Richard Posner is the most cited U.S. legal scholar on record, followed by Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein, and the late New York University law professor Ronald Dworkin.

That’s according to Yale Law librarian Fred Shapiro, who analyzed the law review article and book citations of thousands of legal academics and jurists for a new list of the 50 most-cited legal scholars of all time, which appears in the latest edition of the University of Chicago Law Review.

Shapiro’s list, which includes citations through 2020, includes many familiar names, including Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe at No. 4; former U.S. Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and Antonin Scalia at Nos. 6 and 39, respectively; and former Yale law dean and federal appellate judge Guido Calabresi at No. 25.

But it’s also generating discussion among legal academics about who’s all but missing from the list: women. University of Michigan law professor Catharine MacKinnon is No. 40. Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, who died earlier this year, is the only other women to make the cut, at No. 45.

From here.