On the Leiter Side: Developing a Universal Assessment Tool for Measuring Scholarly Output by Law Professors and Ranking Law Schools

With varying results, many scholars and commentators have focused their attention on judging the quality of law professors, as measured by their scholarly output. First, this Article explains the methods respectively developed by Brian Leiter and Roger Williams University School of Law for top-tier and second-tier law schools, and it considers other works of scholarship that measure academic publication. Then, this Article explicates a protocol (the “Protocol”) for measuring all of the scholarly output of any law school faculty member. Building on the Leiter and Roger Williams methods, the expanded Protocol accounts for a wider breadth of faculty publications and includes weighting factors based on law-journal rankings.

Finally, this Article concludes by applying the Protocol to its Author and his colleagues. In sum, the Protocol that this Article develops and applies will provide a significantly more objective set of data with which to evaluate the scholarly performance of legal academics.