The Relative Value of American Law Reviews: Refinement and Implementation

Ronen Perry, University of Haifa

Abstract

This Article complements a recently published paper in which I discussed the theoretical and methodological aspects of law review rankings. The purpose of this Article 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 2006 ranking and their flagship law reviews’ positions under the proposed method and between these schools’ overall scores and their law reviews’ final scores.