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| | Prof. John Hart Ely Is 4th Most Cited
Legal Scholar Ever;
His Book Is Most Cited Legal Work Of Past 2 Decades
According to studies published in
the January 2000 issue of the University of Chicago's Journal of Legal Studies,
the University of Miami School of Law's Professor John Hart Ely is the fourth
most frequently cited American legal scholar of all time.
With 3,032 cites, he comes just after Oliver Wendell
Holmes (who was cited 3,665 times) and ahead of Roscoe Pound (who had 3,018
cites). Richard A. Posner was in first place with 7,981 cites, and Ronald
Dworkin in second, with 4,488.
Moreover, Ely's 1980 book, Democracy and Distrust: A
Theory of Judicial Review, is the most cited legal book since 1978. It has been
cited 1,460 times. (Professor Dworkin's Law's Empire, which finished second,
came in at 904 citations.)
One of the nation's foremost constitutional law experts
and theorists, Ely is the Richard A. Hausler Professor of Law at the University
of Miami School of Law. He also has been on the faculties of Harvard and Yale
and dean of Stanford Law School.
Professor Ely is the author of On Constitutional Ground
(1996), War and Responsibility (1993), and Democracy and Distrust, which won the
Order of the Coif award as the best book about law published in 1980-82.
The author of the Journal of Legal Studies articles,
Fred R. Shapiro, is assistant librarian for public services and lecturer in
legal research at Yale Law School. He also is the editor of the Oxford
Dictionary of American Legal Quotations and co-editor of Trial and Error: An
Oxford Anthology of Legal Stories.
Shapiro pointed out that the list of most cited
scholars covers legal and social science articles indexed by the Social Sciences
Citation Index from 1956 to 1999. More than 100 legal periodicals plus more than
1,000 periodicals from a wide range of social sciences are included in the
index. Although coverage is worldwide, most of the journals included are
American. Citations are for periodicals, books, articles, and other publications
(even works published prior to 1956, but cited in that year or later).
The list of most cited legal books, Shapiro explained,
is for books cited in legal scholarship, not in court decisions. He used 1978 as
the starting point for his most-cited-book list "because of the limitations
of the data" available about books published before that time.
He noted that citation counts are "relatively
objective tools for assessing scholarly impact" and can be used "to
gauge the impact of a given author or writing." | |
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