Where are the Best (Corporate) Law Professors Teaching?

Abstract

Are the best law professors teaching at the best law schools in the United States? And how can the best law schools around the world be evaluated in terms of the scholarship their professors produce?

This Essay contributes to addressing these questions by examining empirically a specific issue: whether the top-ranking law schools employ the most productive, authoritative and influential scholars of corporate law. In considering this matter, I will also discuss if it is possible, and if so how, to compare law faculties of different countries. This undertaking is generally considered too problematic because of the obvious apples-and-oranges problems raised by comparing legal scholarship and education from different national and cultural contexts.

In Part I I explain the data and the methodology. Part II considers the correlations between the ranking of 25 law schools in the U.S. and different measures of productivity, visibility and relevance of their corporate law professors such as number of publications, H-index, SSRN downloads, and Impact Factor of the journals they have published in, discussing critically the meaning of these and other bibliometric measures. Part III extends the analysis to law faculties in other countries, also exploring possible new approaches to compare the performances of legal researchers operating in different jurisdictions.

Keywords: corporate law, corporate governance, scholarship

JEL Classification: K22