Meta-Ranking (Law & Tech) – 2023

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 page, I provide some initial insight into how specialty Law and Technology journals published by ABA-approved law schools might fare as compared to the flagship journals in the Meta-Ranking.

Note: the MetaRank reported in the tables here refers to the equivalent MetaRank each journal would receive if compared on its own to the flagship Meta-Ranking. A “1000” in any column means the journal was not included in that database. More methodological details and discussion of limitations of these rankings are below, following the rankings.

I welcome feedback!

Law and Tech Rankings - 2023 (no modifier)

Law and Tech Rankings - 2023 (with +15 modifier)

Details about ranking and methods:

This ranking is 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. Among those journals, I have limited this ranking to include only those ranked in the W&L ranking (which only ranks the top 400 overall journals in their system). As such, the rankings here exclude some very prominent law and technology journals published outside the US or by traditional publishing companies AND US specialty journals not ranked in the W&L rankings. 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 above. There are other glaring omissions of wonderful non-US-law-school journals. However, in an effort to at least provide some useful comparisons between flagship and specialty journals, especially in the US legal publishing context, I offer the data above.

• 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).

In the first table, I have not added a modifier (+15 or +50, etc.) to the school rankings, 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. The second table includes these ranking with a +15 modifier added (note that +15 works to devalue the ranking, as a lower value, e.g. 1, is best in this list). Otherwise, I use the same methodology as for the regular meta-ranking of flagship/general law reviews.