The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: Refinement and Implementation

Abstract:     
This Essay complements a recently published article in which I discussed the theoretical and methodological aspects of law review rankings. See Ronen Perry, "The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: A Critical Appraisal of Ranking Methods", Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 11, 2006, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=806144.

The purpose of this Essay is twofold: Refinement of the theoretical framework, and implementation. It proposes, defends, and implements a complex ranking method for general-interest student-edited law reviews, based on a judicious weighting of normalized citation frequency and normalized impact factor. It then analyzes the distribution of journals' scores, and the diminishing marginal difference between them. Finally, it examines the correlation between law schools' positions in the U.S. News & World Report latest ranking and their flagship law reviews' positions under the proposed method, and between these schools' overall scores and their law reviews' final scores.

Keywords: Law reviews, ranking, law schools, legal education, legal scholarship, legal research, U.S. news, leiter

JEL Classifications: K00

Accepted Paper Series