The Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2025

Abstract

Traditional legal scholarship rankings rely almost exclusively on career-long publication metrics, a method that inherently favors decades-old articles and often obscures the authors producing the most impactful research today. This article presents an alternative: a ranking of the 100 most-cited legal scholars based solely on citations to articles published during a recent three-year window. Now in its third year, the ranking reveals who is writing the most impactful legal scholarship right now, regardless of career stage or institutional pedigree. This year's results feature significant movement: a new law school claims the top institutional spot, a scholar from outside the U.S. News top 100 law schools breaks into the top ten for the first time, and women authors reach a new high of seven seats in the top ten. The article also introduces a co-author-adjusted ranking, examines the characteristics of highly cited articles — finding that longer articles and shorter titles continue to dominate — and offers an early assessment of COVID-19's impact on scholarly productivity. Finally, it provides a candid account of how the authors used AI tools, including Claude and Gemini, in preparing this year's ranking, documenting where AI saved significant time and where it did not.

Keywords: legal scholarship rankings, citation analysis, scholarly impact, co-authorship, legal academia, faculty productivity, gender in legal scholarship, COVID-19 academic impact, artificial intelligence in research, artificial intelligence in academic writing, law review citations, academic impact metrics, law faculty rankings, ai in legal research, co-authorship citation allocation, legal academia demographics, recent publication impact, article length and citations, bibliometrics

JEL Classification: K40, K00, K10, I23, O33, K19, K39