Corporate Governance

Law Faculty Blogs and Rankings

By J. Robert Brown

Paul Caron at the Tax Law Blog has put up a post ranking law faculty blogs by page views using site meter data (a counter that appears on most law faculty blogs).  These rankings are useful to some degree for comparison purposes but need to be taken in context.  First, some view traffic as better determined based upon the number of unique visitors (which ought to exclude robots who visit for indexing purposes but sometimes do not).  Second, it is unclear exactly what Site Meter counts as a page view.   Third, traffic does not necessarily equate with influence.  Other ranking metrics (Technorati for example) rank based upon the number of links to a site. 

Finally, these rankings only include those blogs with publicly available data.  There are other popular blogs that do not make their traffic data public (Patently O for example).  None of this is designed to disparage the list.  It is more to point out the problems with the current systems used to rank blogs, much less law faculty blogs. 

Sometime next week, we will offer a list of the top 50 law faculty blogs next week using a variety of metrics that, in addition to traffic, attempt to assess influence.  Thus, the ranking takes into account the number of law review and court citations. 

In the meantime, the internal data for the Race to the Bottom shows that our page visits for the same time covered by Paul Caron are 324,621.  That would put us at #18 on his top 30 list. 

Full post as published by The Race to the Bottom on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).