Ranking Law Schools

I was just looking over the Yale Law School faculty list. My impression is that Yale has slipped drastically over the past twenty years compared to Harvard, in particular, but also Chicago, Virginia, and other law schools. I took a look at Leiter Law School Reports. Professor Leiter publishes lists of the top-cited faculty in various fields of law. I just looked at the most recently published ones:

Antitrust: Yale has 1 of 18, Harvard 2, Chicago 1.

Torts and Insurance, Yale has 0 of 16. Harvard 2. Chicago 2.

Intellectual Property, Yale has 0 of 28 Harvard 0, Chicago 2.

Health Law, Yale has 1 of 18, Harvard 2, Chicago 0.

Family Law, Yale has 1 of 15, Harvard 3. Chicago 0.

Evidence, Yale has 0 of 15, Harvard 0, Chicago 1.

It would be good for someone to do this for all the fields Leiter provides; I don't have time right now. 

Yale does rank number one in citations per professor, with Harvard second, Chicago third, and New York University fourth. Citations per professor is, of course, not the right measure for a law school's impact, since it would say that a law school could increase its impact by firing all but its very best professor. (It is a better measure for scholarly attractiveness to students, since students should care more about the average quality of professors than the total quality.) Yale does well in citations per professor because it is small. But Yale also does well there because its strength is in Constitutional Law. I looked that up, and Yale has 5 of the top 25, Harvard has 3, and Chicago has 4. Con Law gets cited a lot more, because the student editors of law reviews find it glamorous and publish lots more con law articles. The Number 20 professor in that field has 670 cites, compared to