Fourteen Harvard Law School faculty appear among the list of contributors of the most-cited law review articles (in all legal fields) just published in a study on the subject in the Michigan Law Review by Fred R. Shapiro ’80, a librarian at Yale Law School, and Michelle Pearse, a librarian at HLS. The study is available here.
It updates two earlier studies from 1985 and 1996 by Shapiro, using new research tools and databases for greater accuracy. It includes two lists: A selection of the 100 most-cited articles of all time, and another of the 100 most-cited articles from the last 20 years.
An examination of these two lists of 200 articles indicates that 19 of them—almost one-tenth of the total—were authored or coauthored by current HLS faculty. Fourteen current HLS faculty members contributed most-cited articles: Lucian Bebchuk, Yochai Benkler, Jody Freeman, Jack Goldsmith, Louis Kaplow, Duncan Kennedy, Reinier Kraakman, Lawrence Lessig, Frank Michelman, Dean Martha Minow, Robert Mnookin, Mark Roe, Laurence Tribe, and Mark Tushnet. Several of these faculty members contributed more than one most-cited article: Frank Michelman authored three articles, Lucian Bebchuk and Yochai Benkler authored two articles each, and Reinier Kraakman coauthored two articles.