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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

"Law and Order SVU" and the Ranking of Law Reviews

By Alfred Brophy

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Last night I watched a rerun of Law and Order SVU -- about someone who faked multiple personality disorder to get away with killing her parents (she was found not guilty by reason of insanity -- or something like that). The parents (or at least the father) had abused her and her sister as a child. Seems to me that was going a little far to come up with an excuse. But it was actually a pretty entertaining show.

It wasn't until the end of the episode that the detectives realized that the murderer had faked her multiple personality disorder. And you know how they figured it out? They saw a picture of the defendant's sister with a copy of -- get this -- the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal from spring 2001, which had a special issue on muliple personality disorder! The sister had read the journal while in prison (there's a prison library stamp on the cover) and that led the deterctives to find a woman who served in prison with the sister. She told the police that the two sisters had planned the whole MPD thing. I'm not explaining this as well as I could; but this is sort of beside the point of this post....

Now, some time ago I suggested we look to appearances in the media as an indicator of faculty quality ... but this opens up a whole new possibility of ranking of law journals. I mean, how many law journals are featured on television drama shows? I would have thought 0 before last night; now I'll guess 1.

I see the crimlawprof blog gave this some attention back in October 2007. They have a little more detail on the episode. And, why does this not surprise me, there's a whole wiki devoted to "Law and Order," which has the plot of this episode, "Alternate." Wow-- wait a minute -- Cynthia Nixon played the women with MPD.

Anyway, as long as I'm talking about ranking law reviews, I might as well mention that some of my more serious thoughts on the relationship between law review rankings and law school rankings are here and my thoughts on ranking of secondary law journals and law school rankings are here. And for real citation junkies, here's a recent longitudinal study of citations in about fifteen leading journals.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 07, 2009 (boomark / email).