Pitt Law School Faculty Places Among the Top 25

The circulation desk in the recently renovated Barco Law Library 

Pitt Law Dean Mary Crossley 

The University of Pittsburgh School of Law faculty is among the top 25 law school faculties in the nation, according to a new rankings study based upon a standard objective measure of scholarly impact: the number of publication citations for all tenure-stream academic faculty members from 2000 to the present.

The study, titled “Top 35 Law Faculties Based on Scholarly Impact, 2007,” is the latest law school rankings report by Brian Leiter, the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law, professor of philosophy, and director of the law and philosophy program at the University of Texas-Austin, who has been ranking U.S. law schools since 1997.

The study includes the following rankings:

• A ranking by mean per capita citations, in which Pitt’s law school faculty places 21st, tied with those of George Mason University and the University of Minnesota;

• A ranking by median per capita citations, in which Pitt’s law school faculty places 24th, tied with those of Boston University, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Emory University, George Mason University, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, and Washington University in St. Louis; and

• A ranking by a combination of mean and median per capita citations, in which Pitt’s law school faculty places 23rd, tied with that of George Mason University.

The other law school faculties included in the top 25 combined ranking are those of Yale University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Stanford University, New York University, Columbia University, University of California-Berkeley, Duke University, University of Texas-Austin, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, Yeshiva University, the University of Arizona, Boston University, and Emory University.

Pitt has risen steadily in Leiter’s rankings in recent years: In his 2000/02 scholarly impact report, for instance, Pitt was tied for 43rd place with Rutgers University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of San Diego, and Wake Forest University; and in Leiter’s most recent prior scholarly impact report, issued in July 2005 and revised in April 2006, Pitt was tied for 28th place with Arizona State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Iowa.