Why Are Most Of The Amazing Scholars White Men?

‘Diverse’ law professors?

It’s that time of year where we faculty members look at how to serve humanity and improve society…. JUST KIDDING!  We look to the external validation machine.  We’ll submit articles in hopes they arrive at the highest-ranked journal, we’ll hope that the most impressive professors cite them, and we’ll definitely hope that someone takes note of the work we do.

It is with that interest that we look to, market, and gush over the most cited people in academia (using certain metrics of citation).  The most recent paper is that of Gregory Sisk, Nicole Caitlin, Katherine Veenis, and Nicole Zeman, Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties in 2018: Updating the Leiter Score Ranking for the Top Third (August 13, 2018). It’s available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3230371.

The article lists the most cited members of the legal academy, who apparently mostly delve in Constitutional Law and Law & Economics.  Siske et. al. also provide the most cited members of each school’s faculty, with each school rated by scholarly impact.  As Brian Leiter informed me, it’s a citation study.

But it’s more than that to me.  See, there’s a problem.  If you look at the top most cited scholars, they are mostly white men.  If you look at the top five schools in terms of scholarly impact, you find five women and eight people of color.  You don’t find anyone who graduated from a lower-ranked school (my proxy for class).  Why are women, people of color, and people from lower socioeconomic status having trouble getting cited?

For an answer, I quote from my draft article that will appear in the Loyola Chicago Law Review (coauthored with someone who still needs to sign the NDA):

“Our problem with this method of external validation [citation counts] is that it oftentimes…leads to the entrenchment of institutional hierarchies to the detriment of minority groups.  Some examples might prove fruitful to highlight this phenomenon, but we do not wish to rehash the literature here.  Instead, let us look to other fields for guidance.

First, in quite a variety of fields, citations to women-authored articles substantially lag behind men.  For example, in top astronomy journals, citations to articles with women as first authors are disproportionately lower than those with male first authors, even as more women have entered astronomy. In hard-core sciences, men receive a disproportionate share of the citations, too.  In communications, publications from male authors were reported to associate with higher quality in tests. History fares no better.  High impact medical journals also have been reported to be less likely to encounter women as a whole or particularly as first authors. It would be a stunning surprise indeed if legal academia were somehow immune from this.  Across social sciences, studies have suggested that men cite men more often than they cite women.  Hint: There are more men in legal academia.

Against this background of institutional bias, there are signals sent based on gender that make the use of this method laden with concern.  Men cite themselves far more often than women do, across almost all fields.   Women working with men are far less likely to receive credit for their work.

The self-citation game is not just for men.  It is for institutions as well.  Harrison and Mashburn find that citation counts are strongly related to law review rank and author’s alma mater.

When combined with our review of the top 10 law reviews and the articles they published in 2018, the author’s alma mater is a strong determinant of whether the article gets published in the top law reviews in the first place.  Makes you want to look at how diverse admissions policies are in the top 10 law schools, doesn’t it?  I mean, recent Yale controversy aside.

Let’s assume that the top 10 law schools are not havens for race, class, and gender diversity.  Then the game becomes more transparent.  Your best chances of getting published in a top 10 law journal are if you graduated from a top 10 school.  Your best chances of getting strong citation counts are if you publish in a top 10 journal.  Your best chances of getting into academia are if you come from one of the top 10 schools.  Your best chances of being published in a top 10 law journal are if you teach at a top 10 law school.  Your best chances….”

None of this of course suggests the author who cited you read your work.  None of it suggests the author understood your work.  None of it suggests that your work wasn’t just inserted by a student needing a VSF.  Of course, if you’re mentioned above-the-line, that might be a closer indication that the author loved you (or hated you).  But it doesn’t eliminate the question of why women, people of color, and people of lower socioeconomic status don’t seem to qualify for such accolades.

If the answer that comes to your mind is that the law reviews measure quality, consider what you’re saying.  You’re saying that women, people of color, and people of lower socioeconomic status are on average and systematically poorer writers.  You’re also saying that people in lower-castes of legal academia are poorer writers on average, too.  One is hard pressed to find clinicians, librarians, and legal writing professors in that group, too.  Or practitioners.

I’m not saying that if you’re on the list that you aren’t wonderful.  I’m sure each and every person on that list is amazing, and should be touted as minor deities.  I’m saying that there is institutional bias that leads certain classes of people to not be on that list, and that we ought to be humbly checking our own relative privileges.  We also need to do some navel-gazing about what this means for law reviews and how we measure scholarly impact.  I’m pretty sure the answer doesn’t involve a quaint disclaimer that this is just one measure all the while using it in our law porn.

 

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

Why Are Most Of The Amazing Scholars White Men? curated from Above the Law