Citations for environmental and energy law professors 2018

The most-cited environmental and energy law professors in 2013-17

Brian Leiter at Chicago is again doing one of his occasional series identifying the top cited legal scholars in a range of substantive areas.  One of the lists he did covered public law scholars including environmental law– however, his list includes a number of top administrative law scholars who do not focus on environmental and energy law.  As I did the last time Leiter posted these totals, I thought it might be helpful to our readers to have a list that is focused on scholars who work substantially or primarily on environmental and energy law.  Unlike Leiter, I’ve just lumped everyone together without breaking out a separate category for those work only partially in the field—that’s because almost all environmental and energy law scholars could be characterized as working in other areas of law, given the interdisciplinary nature of the work.  So of course Cass Sunstein is number one. All the caveats that Leiter has indicated about the utility of looking at cite counts apply here.  In particular, I also want to emphasize that citations are only a partial and imperfect measure of scholarship, which in turn is only a partial measure of what environmental and energy law professors do.  My numbers differ slightly from Leiter’s at times because for most of these scholars, I did my own searches.   I used the same basic methodology as Leiter (including using the new Westlaw TE search function, which eliminates references in star acknowledgment footnotes), and these are citations from 2013-2017, inclusive.  If any readers identify any errors or omissions, please let me know in the comments or by email.

legal scholarship