ABS:Landes, Citations, age, fame, and the Web

[Gretchen Whitney]

William M. Landes : E-mail: william_landes at law.uchicago.edu
TITLE           Citations, age, fame, and the Web
AUTHOR  Landes WM, Posner RA
JOURNAL JOURNAL OF LEGAL STUDIES  29: (1) 319-344, Part 2 JAN 2000

 Document type: Article    Language: English    Cited References: 3    Times
Cited: 0

Abstract:
This paper focuses on the role of age in explaining the ranking of legal
scholars by the number of citations to their scholarship and the
relationship between scholarly and " popular" reputations, with the latter
being proxied by the number of "hits" on the World Wide Web or newspaper
citations. As predicted by human capital theory, nearly 40 percent of the
top 100 legal scholars were between 60 and 86 in 1998. When we turn to
popular reputations, we find that compared to really famous people (such as
President Clinton and former presidents), top legal scholars are not famous
at all. The data also suggest that fame among the larger public is more
unequally distributed than scholarly reputation. We use regression analysis
to study scholarly and public reputation. We find that being a Supreme Court
justice (but not being a judge of any other court) and having had another
high government position (such as solicitor general of the United States)
has a statistically significant effect on one's public but not scholarly
reputation. Overall, we find a small though statistically significant link
between scholarly and public reputation.

Addresses:
Landes WM, Univ Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 USA.
Univ Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637 USA.

Publisher:
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO

IDS Number:
339PD

ISSN:
0047-2530

Cited Author            Cited Work                Volume      Page      Year

 LANDES WM             J LAW ECON                    36       385      1993
 LANDES WM             J LAW ECON                    19       249      1976
 LANDES WM             J LEGAL STUD                  27       271      1998

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