Women Dominate Top 10 in Ranking of Most-Cited U.S. Legal Scholars
A study from George Mason University finds that seven of the ten most-cited law professors last year were women.
The traditionally male-dominated world of legal scholarship may be shifting—at least according to one new ranking.
Research published this month by George Mason University academics Melanie Knapp and Rob Willey shows that seven of the 10 most-cited legal scholars in the United States last year were women.
That marks the highest number since the annual ranking began three years ago and more than doubles the representation of women in the top 10 compared with earlier editions of the study.
Across the full list, the researchers found that 64 of the top-cited scholars used “he” as their pronoun, 35 used “she,” and one used “they.” The 35 women included in the 2025 ranking represents a slight decline from the previous year, when 37 women appeared on the list, but an increase from the inaugural 2023 ranking, which counted 33 women among the top 100 scholars.
Numerous rankings attempt to measure the influence of legal scholars, but many rely on career-long citation totals. Such metrics tend to favor older articles—and the scholars who wrote them—because those works have had decades to accumulate citations. As a result, those rankings often skew heavily male.
Knapp and Willey argue that this approach “obscures the authors producing the most impactful research today.” So instead, their ranking focuses exclusively on citations to articles published within a recent three-year window, reducing the influence of career length or institutional prestige.
For the 2025 ranking, the researchers examined citations to articles published in 2019, 2020, and 2021. They selected this timeframe because scholarly citations take time to accumulate. According to the study, most law review articles reach their citation peak roughly four years after publication.
The most cited legal scholar in the 2025 ranking was Danielle Keats Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Citron published 13 articles between 2019 and 2021. Together they were cited 670 times in 2025.
