Ranking Law & Technology Journals – 2022

One the limitations of the annual Meta-Ranking I publish is that it only applies to flagship law reviews at ABA-approved law schools in the US. One of the requests I get is to include secondary (or specialty) journals. With this post, I wanted to provide some initial insight into how Law and Technology journals might fare as compared to the flagship journals in the Meta-Ranking. This ranking is also limited. For example, I have only included journals published by (or in collaboration with) ABA-approved law schools in the US that are categorized by the Washington & Lee law journal ranking system as fitting into one of these four categories: 1) Arts, Entertainment and Sports Law; 2) Communications and Media Law; 3) Intellectual Property; and 4) Science, Technology and Computing Law. As such, the rankings here exclude some very prominent law and technology journals published outside the US or by traditional publishing companies. For example, Computer Law & Security Review ranks as the #1 “Technology Law” journal in Google Scholar’s ranking system but is not included in the table below. There are other glaring omissions. However, in an effort to at least provide some useful comparisons between flagship and specialty journals, I offer the data below.

• prRank = US News Peer Reputation score ranking for the school (averaged over 10 years);
• usnRank = overall US News school ranking for the school (averaged over 10 years);
• wluRank = Washington & Lee Law Journal Ranking;
• gRank = Google Scholar Metrics ranking (note: “1000” means journal was not indexed).

The MetaRank shown here indicates where in the flagship meta-ranking each journal would appear it if were the only journal added into that ranking. And, it should be noted that I have not added a modifier (+15 or +50, etc.) to the school rankings in the first table below, although some commentary frequently suggests (e.g., on the now defunct submissions angsting threads on PrawfsBlawg) that adding such a modifier to a school ranking to distinguish the specialty journal from the flagship journal might be appropriate. See the second table, below, for the rankings with a +15 modifier added. Otherwise, I use the same methodology as for the regular meta-ranking.

I welcome feedback!

Ranking with Modifier

And here is the ranking with a +15 modifier added to each prRank and usnRank: