Is There a Correlation Between Law Professor Publication Counts, Law Review Citation Counts, and Teaching Evaluations? An Empirical Study

• Published date: 01 September 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-1461.2008.00135.x
• Date: 01 September 2008
• Author: Benjamin Barton

Is There a Correlation Between Law

Professor Publication Counts, Law

Review Citation Counts, and Teaching

Evaluations? An Empirical Study

Benjamin Barton*

This empirical study attempts to answer an age-old debate in legal academia:

whether scholarly productivity helps or hurts teaching. The study is of an

unprecedented size and scope. It covers every tenured or tenure-track faculty

member at 19 U.S. law schools, a total of 623 professors. The study gathers

four years of teaching evaluation data (calendar years 2000–2003) and tests

for associations between the teaching data and five different measures of

research productivity/scholarly influence. The results are counterintuitive:

there is either no correlation or a slight positive correlation between teaching

effectiveness and any of the five measures of research productivity. Given the

breadth of the study, this finding is quite robust. These findings should help

inform debates about teaching and scholarship among law school and other

*University of Tennessee College of Law, 1505 W. Cumberland Ave., Knoxville, TN 37996;

email: bbarton@utk.edu.

The author specially thanks Indya Kincannon, Glenn Reynolds, Eugene Volokh, James

Lindgren, Brian Leiter, James Maule, Richard E. Redding, Brannon Denning, Tom Galligan,

Joan Heminway, Mae Quinn, Greg Stein, Jennifer Hendricks, Geroge Kuney, Jeff Hirsch, Chris

Sagers, the participants of faculty forums at the Villanova University School of Law, Cumberland

School of Law, Samford University, the University of Tennessee College of Law, the Southeast-

ern Association of Law Schools Panel on Empirical Research, the University of Tennessee

College of Law for generous research support, and the Honorable Diana Gribbon Motz. The

author thanks the faculty and administration (and particularly the deans and associate deans)

of all the participating schools: the University of Colorado School of Law, the University of

Connecticut School of Law, the Cumberland School of Law, Samford University, the Levin

College of Law at the University of Florida, the University of Iowa College of Law, the Lewis &

Clark Law School, the University of Michigan Law School, the University of North Dakota Law

School, the Northwestern University School of Law, the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State

University, the Penn State Dickinson School of Law, the Southwestern Law School, St. John’s

University School of Law, the University of Tennessee College of Law, the Texas Tech University

School of Law, the University of Toledo Law School, the UCLA School of Law, the Villanova

University School of Law, and the Wayne State University Law School.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 5, Issue 3, 619–644, September 2008

© 2008, Copyright the Author

Journal compilation © 2008, Cornell Law School and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

619

faculties and likely require some soul-searching about the interaction

between the two most important functions of U.S. law schools.

Anyone who has spent any time in legal academia has heard some version of

the scholarship versus teaching debate. The debate breaks down into two

camps that I call “pro-teaching” and “pro-scholarship” for brevity’s sake,

although I recognize that either camp may object to these labels as too

simplistic. The pro-teaching folks bemoan how current legal academia places

excessive emphasis on scholarly pursuits, and argue that we are inevitably

shortchanging our students. The pro-scholarship group retorts that our best

scholars are naturally our best and most up-to-date teachers. Thus, it is the

faculty who neglect scholarship who are actually harming students. This

debate has also been echoed in various law review articles (Korobkin 1998

(pro-scholarship); Scordato 1990 (pro-teaching)).

On the one hand, it seems likely that working hard on scholarship

should have a positive effect on teaching. Productive scholars do tend to stay

on top of their research areas, and are also very engaged with the material

about which they write. On the other hand, it also makes sense that if law

professors are spending more and more of their time on scholarship they

must be shortchanging their teaching.

The question itself is likely impossible to answer definitively, especially

since there is little agreement about how to measure either the quality of

teaching or the quality/impact of legal scholarship. This study does not try to

answer these questions once and for all, but does the best it can with the

available data. I gathered three different types of data from the tenured or

tenure-track faculties at 19 U.S. law schools. I gathered four years of teaching

evaluations. I also did a publication count across those same four years.

Lastly, I gathered law review citation data. I used the publication count and

citation data to generate a total of five different measures of scholarly output,

and correlated each measure against teaching evaluations. The study found

that there is either no correlation or a slight positive correlation between

teaching evaluations and publication count or citation counts.

I. Previous Studies

Over the last 50 years there have been a number of studies of the correlation

between teaching effectiveness and research productivity in higher educa-

tion. There are three excellent overviews of these studies: a meta-analysis by

620 Barton