More on the Relative Value of American Law Reviews

Professor Perry has followed up his early work of law reviews by posting The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: Refinement and Implementation on SSRN.

Abstract:  This Essay complements a recently published article in which I discussed the theoretical and methodological aspects of law review rankings. See Ronen Perry, The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: A Critical Appraisal of Ranking Methods, Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 11, 2006.

The purpose of this Essay is twofold: Refinement of the theoretical framework, and implementation. It proposes, defends, and implements a complex ranking method for general-interest student-edited law reviews, based on a judicious weighting of normalized citation frequency and normalized impact factor. It then analyzes the distribution of journals' scores, and the diminishing marginal difference between them. Finally, it examines the correlation between law schools' positions in the U.S. News & World Report latest ranking and their flagship law reviews' positions under the proposed method, and between these schools' overall scores and their law reviews' final scores.