Journal of Legal Metrics volume one, number one 2012 Journal of Legal Metrics Editors-in-Chief Adam Aft, Alex B. Mitchell & Craig D. Rust Senior Editors Joshua Cumby, Tom Cummins, Thomas R. DeCesar & Rosanne Rust Editors Gordon Breuer, Brendan Coffman, Justin Du Mouchel, Daniel Friedheim, Benjamin A. Gianforti, Lauren Girardot, Jeremy Greenberg, Tashina Harris, Emily Christine Kendall, Daniel Klionsky, Megan Marinos, Brian Rock, Daniel Rodriguez, Sarah Nash, John Sandell, Sarah Snider & Matthew Weinstein _________________________________________________________________ About the cover Law School Dean Demographics By Ross E. Davies and Alex B. Mitchell. Source: The Association of American Law Schools 2010-2011 Directory of Law Teachers 3-256, 1875-87, 1889-92 (2010) (sections titled “Law Teachers by School at Member Schools,” “List II – Minority Law Teachers,” and “List III – Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Community Law Teachers”). According to the AALS Directory, 42 of the 171 listed law schools are led by female deans, one school is led by a member of a minority, and two schools are led by members of the gay/lesbian/ bisexual/transsexual community. In our experience, the AALS Directory is based at least in large part on self-reported and home-institution-reported data. _________________________________________________________________ The Journal of Legal Metrics operates on the same terms as the Journal of Law. Please write to us at [email protected]. Copyright © 2012 by The Green Bag, Inc., ex- cept where otherwise indicated and for U.S. governmental works. ISSN 2157-9067 (print) and 2157-9075 (online). CONTENTS __________________________________________________________________________ Volume 1 • Number 1 • 2012 __________________________________________________________________________ An Introduction to the Journal of Legal Metrics by Adam Aft, Alex B. Mitchell & Craig D. Rust ................................... 15 Original Jurisdiction Standings by David Hatton & Jay Wexler ....................................................... 19 Law School Website Rankings by Roger Skalbeck ...................................................................... 25 Tops in THOMAS by Andrew Weber ...................................................................... 53 Appellate Review by Tom Cummins & Adam Aft ....................................................... 59 24 Rounds: Justices Scalia’s and Stevens’s Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds by Craig D. Rust ........................................................................ 77 Reading the Tea Leaves: Tallying the Votes of the Tea Party in the 112th Congress by Ian Gallagher & Brian Rock ........................................................ 87 Off the Beaten Voting Path: Maverick Voting in Congress by Alex B. Mitchell ................................................................... 113 The Leadership Legacy of Justice John Paul Stevens by Craig D. Rust ...................................................................... 135 Supreme Court Sluggers: Introducing the Justices Scalia, Fortas, and Goldberg Trading Cards by Ross E. Davies, Craig D. Rust & Adam Aft ................................... 155 Law Review Circulation 2011: More Change, More Same by Ross E. Davies ..................................................................... 179 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNAL OF LEGAL METRICS When the numbers acquire the significance of language . they acquire the power to do all the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry. And it is not just base- ball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glo- ry, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is dis- cipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub- conscious really understands. – Bill James1 Adam Aft, Alex B. Mitchell & Craig D. Rust† or the second time in the past ten years, Moneyball is taking the world by storm. Michael Lewis’s book first appeared in print in 2003, chronicling the attempt by Billy Beane and the FOakland Athletics to compete for a World Series title on a shoe- string budget by finding hidden value in the market for baseball players. Within the past year, Brad Pitt and a host of others brought Lewis’s tale to life in the form of a blockbuster movie. How did Beane and Moneyball’s protagonists set out to find this value? As Lewis explains, they embraced the use of statistical analy- sis in ways that other Major League Baseball franchises did not. Ra- ther than relying on a scout’s evaluation of a player’s physical char- acteristics and the industry’s prevailing view of what a player with those characteristics could achieve in the game, Beane and company focused their energies on how that player actually performed. This 1 MICHAEL M. LEWIS, MONEYBALL 67 (2003) (second omission in original). † Co-Editors-in-Chief of the Journal of Legal Metrics. 2 JOURNAL OF LAW (1 J. LEGAL METRICS) 15 ADAM AFT, ALEX B. MITCHELL & CRAIG D. RUST included areas of the game such as defense, which conventional baseball statistics had largely ignored for most of the sport’s first century in existence. In the book, John Henry, currently the owner of the Boston Red Sox, compared the financial markets on Wall Street with the market for baseball players: People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of im- ages/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.2 Similarly, the legal field is not immune to the subjective biases and beliefs of its observers and practitioners. Numbers, data, statis- tical analysis – these tools can help us objectively evaluate the accu- racy of subjectively formed opinions. Notwithstanding the oft-cited “I know it when I see it” jurisprudence of Justice Potter Stewart,3 we believe that some aspects of the legal world lend themselves to a form of scientific analysis. In this vein, we humbly introduce the inaugural issue of the Jour- nal of Legal Metrics. Our aim is to solicit and publish the efforts of scholars whose work demonstrates the explanatory power of num- bers and statistics in the legal context. For example, the journal has partnered with the Supreme Court Sluggers project4 and will serve as the primary forum in which the personal opinion authorship and citation statistics of individual U.S. Supreme Court justices gathered by their researchers will be disseminated. To that end, this issue includes articles introducing the latest trading cards and their associ- ated statistics, featuring Justices Scalia, Goldberg, and Fortas, as well as essays on the Justices Stevens and Scalia cards. The journal also joins forces with FantasyLaw,5 a project devoted to collecting 2 Id. 90-91. 3 Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964) (Stewart, J., concurring). 4 Supreme Court Sluggers Home, www.greenbag.org/sluggers/sluggers_home. html. 5 FantasyLaw Home, www.fantasylaw.org. 16 2 JOURNAL OF LAW (1 J. LEGAL METRICS) INTRODUCTION data on voting and legislative patterns of senators and representa- tives of the United States Congress. In this issue, FantasyLaw features an article that analyzes the Tea Party’s voting behavior in the House of Representatives, as well as a study on politicians who vote with the opposing party and the frequency with which they do so. In ad- dition to voting behavior there is also an essay on the most searched bills in THOMAS.6 We are also pleased to publish three sets of sta- tistical rankings: Roger Skalbeck’s law school website rankings, now in their third year, federal appellate court rankings evaluating which circuits “win” circuit splits most often, compiled by Tom Cummins and Adam Aft, and in its fourth year, Ross Davies’s law review cir- culation numbers. Data challenges the status quo, requiring reconciliation of sub- jective beliefs with objective measures, and encouraging re- examination of former truths and assumptions. Whether it is quanti- fying the impact of Justice Stevens’s career on the Court, discerning the impact of the Tea Party on national politics,7 or reconsidering the way we think about law school statistics,8 numbers can provide a much-needed alternative prospective. We hope not necessarily to answer the question: “What does the data say?” but rather: “Where is the data in the first place?” Too often commentary surrounding the law is based in opinion, rhetoric, and subjectivity; the founda- tion of scholarship here is that of numbers and statistics. As once observed by Holmes (Sherlock, not Oliver Wendell), “[i]t is a capi- tal mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence.”9 # # # 6 THOMAS is “the legislative forum from the Library of Congress,” thomas.loc. gov/home/thomas.php. 7 Ian Gallagher and Brian Rock, Reading The Tea Leaves – An Analysis of Tea Party Behavior Inside and Outside of the House, 2 J.L. (1 J. LEGAL METRICS) 87 (2012). 8 See, e.g., Debra Cassens Weiss, University of Illinois Releases the Real Stats for Its Incoming Law Class, ABA JOURNAL, Sept. 20, 2011, available at www.abajournal. com/news/article/university_of_illinois_releases_the_real_stats_for_its_incomi ng_law_class. 9 ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,