Where Is Harvard Law School?

[Fred Shapiro]

I apologize for diverting attention from the very important substantive 
discussion of the Alito hearings with a question about the sociology of 
legal scholarship that may be too much elite-law-school-inside-baseball 
for many on this list, but here goes:

I notice that the New York Times "News Analysis" about the hearings this 
morning quotes Cass Sunstein of Chicago, Jack Balkin of Yale, Vikram Amar 
of Hastings, Mark Tushnet of Georgetown, John Yoo of Berkeley, Noah 
Feldman of NYU, Douglas Kmiec of Pepperdine, Judith Resnik of Yale.  It 
strikes me that no one from Harvard Law School is quoted, reminding me 
that I recently compiled data for a list of the most-cited law review 
articles of the last 10 years and found that Harvard Law School faculty 
figured on the list only minimally.  I also found that none of the seven 
most-cited articles from that period were published in the Harvard Law 
Review, which has dominated all previous most-cited lists.

So I am wondering whether Harvard Law School may have in recent years 
dropped off the intellectual map of legal scholarship relative to its past 
position of great prominence?  Does this ring true subjectively with any 
students of legal scholarship?  (I realize that Harvard Law School may 
still kick ass in other aspects of its mission, such as training leaders 
of the bar or future Supreme Court justices or influencing the corporate 
world or influencing elites in foreign countries.)

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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