AUSTIN, Texas — Science Watch, a publication of Thomson Institute for Scientific Information, ranks the UT law faculty 5th in the United States based on the impact of its scholarship. Scholarly impact is measured by "average-citations-per-paper" written by Texas faculty during the five-year period from 1997 through 2001.
The only law faculties ranked more highly than Texas were Yale, Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan.
Prior studies of scholarly impact in the Journal of Legal Studies covering the early and mid-1990s had ranked Texas no higher than 11th.
"Texas has had one of the nation's leading law faculties for decades, but this new Science Watch study is gratifying recognition of how a great faculty has recently been getting even better," remarked Dean Bill Powers.
In recent years, for example, Texas has hired faculty away from Michigan, Northwestern, NYU, Oxford, and UCLA, among other places.