The Most Scholarly Justices

I started subscribing to The Green Bag as a 1L in 2002. And I've been a subscriber ever since.  It's always been a favorite read & had an importance influence on how I thought about legal scholarship. As I observed in a 2005 letter "To The Bag," it was a model for the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, which I co-founded in 2004. A couple of months ago, Howard Wasserman posted about one of the articles in the Green Bag micro-symposium on A Top Ten Ranking of the U.S. Supreme Court, Scott Dodson & Ami A. Dodson's Literary Justice, which provided an (very amusing) empirical analysis of Supreme Court opinions in order to determine which justice is the most literate.

As it happens, I was exceptionally pleased to also be included in the micro-symposium, represented by a short "empirical" article titled The Most Scholarly Justices, which purports to identify the "most scholarly justices" in history by counting both their respective publications and citations. I don't think it's a spoiler to divulge that some of the results were rather unexpected: the most productive justice was Warren E. Burger (quelle horreur!) and the most "impactful" was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. But not to worry, the Notorious RBG was among the few who ranked on both charts, as #2 most productive & #7 most impactful.