New Study Ranks UC Irvine Law Faculty Seventh in Nation
IRVINE, Calif., July 17, 2012 - Just two months after graduating its first class, UC Irvine School of Law was ranked seventh in the nation in terms of scholarly impact.
A study published July 16 by the University of St. Thomas School of Law measured the impact of law faculties based on citations in scholarly journals. UC Irvine's faculty ranked seventh behind Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, New York University and Columbia. Vanderbilt, Cornell and UC Berkeley law faculties rounded out the top 10.
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of UCI Law said: "While all rankings and citation counts should be taken with a grain of salt, this is still wonderful news. It is a reflection of the terrific faculty we have and the great staff support for all aspects of the law school."
Rounding out the top 20 are other law schools that 'traditionally ranked among the nation's elite institutions," according to the study: Pennsylvania, Duke, Northwestern, Michigan, UCLA, Virginia, George Washington, Georgetown, Minnesota, and Texas.
A similar study published in 2010 ranked UC Irvine ninth, and one the previous year ranked it tenth. The law school opened in 2009.
The "Scholarly Impact Score" used in the ranking is calculated from the mean and the median of the total law journal citations by tenured law faculty over the last five years. More details about the study.
Gregory Sisk, a professor at University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis who co-authored the study, told the Wall Street Journal that the ranking should be an important factor to prospective law students because it demonstrates "whether there's an intellectual excitement" among the faculty.
Learn more about UCI Law's Faculty
Contact: Rex Bossert, assistant dean for communications, rbossert@law.uci.edu, 949-824-3063.
About UCI School of Law
UC Irvine School of Law seeks to create the ideal law school for the 21st century by doing the best job of training lawyers for the practice of law at the highest levels of the profession. Recruited from prestigious schools, the faculty ranked seventh in the country in scholarly impact in a recent study. The student body has median grades and LSAT scores comparable to those of student bodies at top 20 law schools. The school's innovative curriculum stresses hands-on learning, interdisciplinary study and public service.