The University of Chicago Magazine

February 1997

CHICAGO JOURNAL

Law School's greatest hits

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., has nothing on U of C law professor emeritus Ronald H. Coase. When a law librarian at Yale University checked footnote citations from judicial opinions and law-review articles to discover the most-cited law article of all time, Coase's "The Problem of Social Cost," published in 1960 in the Journal of Law and Economics, had 1,741 citations--373 mentions ahead of the runner-up, Herbert Weschler's 1959 "Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law" (Harvard Law Review).

According to Yale law librarian Fred R. Shapiro's lists, published in a recent Chicago-Kent College of Law Review, the U of C Law School also scored high in most-cited articles of recent years. Eight articles by Cass R. Sunstein, the Karl N. Llewellyn distinguished service professor, made the grade, including the No. 1 spots for articles written in 1988 and 1985. Sunstein's 1988 "Beyond the Republican Revival," from the Yale Law Journal, has been cited 208 times, while his 1985 "Interest Groups in American Public Law," from the Stanford Law Review, has received 301 citations.


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