Most Cited Private Law Articles Published in the Last 25 Years

Post by Ted Sichelman

Recently, I began a project to trace the influence of legal scholars from the late 19th century through the present using citation networks. Building off of this work, I've assembled a list of the most cited private law articles published over the last twenty-five years (see  below).

In determining whether an article fell into the "private law" category, I first performed a search in HeinOnline to retrieve all law journal articles published since 1990, ordered by citation count. Then, I reviewed the title and often the content of every highly cited article (more than 200 citations). I included in the most-cited list any article in the areas of torts, property, contracts, intellectual property, commercial law, wills & trusts, and remedies, as well as any article heavily drawing upon methods from those fields. (No other areas of private law had enough citations to justify inclusion.) I excluded articles in public law or hybrid fields, such as corporate law (unless the article focused on contract or commercial law), employment law, family law, securities law, cyberlaw, antitrust, and privacy. Of course, this process required some judgment, but no more than a few of the articles were close calls in my view (avoiding the thorny question of whether intellectual property is a hybrid field).

Note that the citation counts only reflect citations to published law review articles, and not books, cases, practitioner materials, unpublished articles, non-law articles, and other sources. As a check, I ran about ten articles through Lexis and generally found the citation counts on HeinOnline were within 15% of those tabulated in Lexis's "Law Review and Journals" category, so it does not appear that the rankings would change much using Lexis. (Indeed, using Lexis for this sort of study would be nearly impossible to do from scratch, as there is no simple way to re-order the result list by citation count on Lexis, or Google Scholar for that matter. WestlawNext does allow re-ordering of results by citation count but does not display the actual citation count in the initial result list, making it too time-consuming to use.)

Last, I only report total citations, which biases the rankings towards older articles. Because I had to review many articles to assemble this list, it would have been too much work to review articles with fewer than 200 overall citations on the chance that their time-adjusted citation counts were high enough to justify inclusion. However, I plan to update this list annually, so more recent articles that are highly cited will appear in later iterations.

I apologize in advance for any errors or omissions—if you believe an article should be included, please let me know (tsichelman@sandiego.edu), and I'll do my best to promptly make any deserving corrections.

 

50 Most Cited Private Law Articles: 1990-2015

 

 

Rank	# of Citations	Author(s)	Title	Cite
1	698	Leval, Pierre N.	Toward a Fair Use Standard [comments]	103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105 (1990)
2	598	Merges, Robert P.; Nelson, Richard R.	On the Complex Economics of Patent Scope [article]	90 Colum. L. Rev. 839 (1990)
3	460	Litman, Jessica	Public Domain, The [article]	39 Emory L. J. 965 (1990)
4	459	Bernstein, Lisa	Opting out of the Legal System: Extralegal Contractual Relations in the Diamond Industry	21 J. Legal Stud. 115 (1992)
5	458	Burk, Dan L.; Lemley, Mark A.	Policy Levers in Patent Law [article]	89 Va. L. Rev. 1575 (2003)
6	457	Lemley, Mark A.	Economics of Improvement in Intellectual Property Law [article]	75 Tex. L. Rev. 989 (1997)
7	443	Gordon, Wendy J.	Property Right in Self-Expression: Equality and Individualism in the Natural Law of Intellectual Property, A [article]	102 Yale L.J. 1533 (1993)
8	427	Harris, Cheryl I.	Whiteness as Property [article]	106 Harv. L. Rev. 1707 (1993)
9	423	Lemley, Mark A.	Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office [notes]	95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1495 (2001)
10	419	Netanel, Neil Weinstock	Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society [article]	106 Yale L.J. 283 (1996)
11	406	Heller, Michael A.	Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets, The [article]	111 Harv. L. Rev. 621 (1998)
12	389	Saks, Michael J.	Do We Really Know Anything About the Behavior of the Tort Litigation System – and Why Not [article]	140 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1147 (1992)
13	377	Lemley, Mark A.	Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding [article]	83 Tex. L. Rev. 1031 (2005)
14	351	Merges, Robert P.	Contracting into Liability Rules: Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Rights Organizations [article]	84 Cal. L. Rev. 1293 (1996)
15	343	Samuelson, Pamela; Davis, Randall; Kapor, Mitchell D.; Reichman, J. H.	Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs, A [article]	94 Colum. L. Rev. 2308 (1994)
16	335	Ellickson, Robert C.	Property in Land [article]	102 Yale L.J. 1315 (1993)
17	322	Eisenberg, Melvin Aron	Limits of Contract, The [article]	47 Stan. L. Rev. 211 (1995)
18	317	Bernstein, Lisa	Merchant Law in a Merchant Court: Rethinking the Code's Search for Immanent Business Norms [article]	144 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1765 (1996)
19	314	Lemley, Mark A.	Modern Lanham Act and the Death of Common Sense, The [article]	108 Yale L.J. 1687 (1999)
20	301	Hansmann, Henry; Kraakman, Reinier	Toward Unlimited Shareholder Liability for Corporate Torts [article]	100 Yale L.J. 1879 (1991)
21	289	Netanel, Neil Weinstock	Locating Copyright within the First Amendment Skein [article]	54 Stan. L. Rev. 1 (2001)
22	283	Lemley, Mark A.; Volokh, Eugene	Freedom of Speech and Injunctions in Intellectual Property Cases [article]	48 Duke L.J. 147 (1998)
23	280	Gordon, Wendy J.	On Owning Information: Intellectual Property and the Restitutionary Impulse [article]	78 Va. L. Rev. 149 (1992)
24	279	Samuelson, Pamela	Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to be Revised [article]	14 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 519 (1999)
24	279	Litman, Jessica	Lawful Personal Use [article]	85 Tex. L. Rev. 1871 (2007)
26	278	Coffee, John C. Jr.	Does Unlawful Mean Criminal: Reflections on the Disappearing Tort/Crime Distinction in American Law [article]	71 B.U. L. Rev. 193 (1991)
26	278	Merrill, Thomas W.; Smith, Henry E.	Optimal Standardization in the Law of Numerus Clausus Principle [article]	110 Yale L.J. 1 (2000)
26	287	Schwartz, Alan; Scott, Robert E.	Contract Theory and the Limits of Contract Law [article]	113 Yale L.J. 541 (2003)
29	273	Allison, John R.; Lemley, Mark A.	Empirical Evidence on the Validity of Litigated Patents [article]	26 AIPLA Q.J. 185 (1998)
30	257	Lemley, Mark A.	Intellectual Property and Shrinkwrap Licenses [article]	68 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1239 (1995)
30	257	Sax, Joseph L.	Property Rights and the Economy of Natures: Understanding Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council [article]	45 Stan. L. Rev. 1433 (1993)
32	252	Merges, Robert P.	As Many as Six Impossible Patents Before Breakfast: Property Rights for Business Concepts and Patent System Reform [article]	14 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 577 (1999)
33	249	Polinsky, A. Mitchell; Shavell, Steven	Punitive Damages: An Economic Analysis [article]	111 Harv. L. Rev. 869 (1998)
33	249	Ayres, Ian; Talley, Eric	Solomonic Bargaining: Dividing a Legal Entitlement to Facilitate Coasean Trade [article]	104 Yale L.J. 1027 (1995)
35	246	Korobkin, Russell	Bounded Rationality, Standard Form Contracts, and Unconscionability [article]	70 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1203 (2003)
35	246	Ginsburg, Jane C.	Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information [article]	90 Colum. L. Rev. 1865 (1990)
37	244	Cohen, Julie E.	Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at Copyright Management in Cyberspace, A [article]	28 Conn. L. Rev. 981 (1996)
38	243	Jaszi, Peter	Toward a Theory of Copyright: The Metamorphoses of Authorship [article]	1991 Duke L.J. 455 (1991)
39	239	Kaplow, Louis; Shavell, Steven	Property Rules Versus Liability Rules: An Economic Analysis [article]	109 Harv. L. Rev. 713 (1996)
40	234	LoPucki, Lynn M.	Death of Liability, The [article]	106 Yale L.J. 1 (1996)
41	232	Korobkin, Russell	Status Quo Bias and Contract Default Rules [article]	83 Cornell L. Rev. 608 (1998)
42	229	Kahan, Marcel; Klausner, Michael	Standardization and Innovation in Corporate Contracting (Or the Economics of Biolerplate) [article]	83 Va. L. Rev. 713 (1997)
43	228	Rai, Arti Kaur	Regulating Scientific Research: Intellectual Property Rights and the Norms of Science [article]	94 Nw. U. L. Rev. 77 (1999)
44	225	Posner, Eric A.	Law, Economics, and Inefficient Norms [article]	144 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1697 (1996)
45	224	Boyle, James	Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, The [article]	66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 33 (2003)
46	221	Merrill, Thomas W.	Property and the Right to Exclude [comments]	77 Neb. L. Rev. 730 (1998)
47	220	Dreyfuss, Rochelle Cooper	Expressive Genericity: Trademarks as Language in the Pepsi Generation [article]	65 Notre Dame L. Rev. 397 (1990)
48	219	Schwartz, Gary T.	Reality in the Economic Analysis of Tort Law: Does Tort Law Really Deter [article]	42 UCLA L. Rev. 377 (1994)
49	216	Lemley, Mark A.	Intellectual Property Rights and Standard-Setting Organizations [article]	90 Cal. L. Rev. 1889 (2002)
50	215	Moore, Kimberly A.	Judges, Juries, and Patent Cases – An Empirical Peek Inside the Black Box [article]	99 Mich. L. Rev. 365 (2000)