Brooklyn Law Faculty Exhibits a FLAIR for Academic Impact

Brooklyn Law School has ranked #31 on the new Forward-Looking Academic Impact Rankings (FLAIR) rankings, which examines how frequently faculty members are cited within law review articles.  

The new rankings were published June 2 in the abstract for an academic study written by Matthew Sag, Professor of Law and Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science at Emory University School of Law, which is to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Florida State University Law Review. He explains that the rankings introduced in his article “are based on data that shows how many times law review articles by each of 5,139 individual faculty members at 191 American law schools have been cited by other law review articles in the last five years.” 

 Sag asserts that the rankings cited in the article “can be used as an objective guide to the relative academic impact of law schools, or as a component in broader objective rankings.” 

 The rankings, which examined all American Bar Association-accredited law schools, “are based on publicly available, reliable, and objective data obtained from law school websites and the research platform, HeinOnline,” Sag’s abstract on SSRN said.   

 “The FLAIR rankings are “designed to impart meaningful information by clustering schools into tiers based on their distance from the mean of all schools and deemphasizing ordinal rankings. Thus, the FLAIR rankings enable readers to make rational comparisons between law schools, rather than simply creating a hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake,” Sag writes.  

Vice Dean and Centennial Professor of Law Miriam Baer said the FLAIR rankings provide confirmation of the high level of respect that Brooklyn Law’s faculty has garnered among its peers.  

 “Our faculty has long been known for its dual commitment to producing widely read and impactful scholarship and to developing the next generation of lawyers, activists, and thinkers,” Baer said. “Rankings can be arbitrary and fickle, but it is gratifying to confirm that our faculty’s scholarship is extremely well-regarded and relied upon by the legal academy, and by the students, practitioners, and jurists who digest and cite legal scholarship on a daily basis.”