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    Jurimetrics Fall 2019

    Volume 60 Issue 1  

    Celebrating Jurimetrics’ Diamond Anniversary

    Diana M. Bowman

    The Fourth Industrial Revolution, so coined by Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, will be driven by new and emerging technologies—from the Internet of Things through to artificial intelligence, machine learning, gene editing, autonomous vehicles, quantum computing and others that we cannot even begin to imagine today. Collectively the promise to address major societal challenges, including many of those articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and undo many of the harms that we are now facing is a result of previous waves of innovation.

    Here’s to Jurimetrics and to Its Bright Future!

    Julie A. Fleming

    Congratulations to Jurimetrics for sixty years of scholarship at the intersection of law, science, and technology! The ABA Science & Technology Law Section (SciTech) has had the honor of sponsoring Jurimetrics, providing members of the Editorial Board, and funding awards for outstanding editors. SciTech also invites student editors and faculty to join our Annual Meeting activities. This collaboration has helped Jurimetrics to become not just the oldest but also the most respected journal of its type.

    Article

    Legal Education

    Ranking the Academic Impact of 100 American Law Schools

    Paul J. Heald and Ted Sichelman

    ABSTRACT: U.S. News & World Report and rankings-minded scholars have constructed several measures of faculty impact at U.S. law schools, but each has been limited in a variety of ways. For instance, the U.S. News “peer assessment” rankings rely on the qualitative opinions of a small group of professors and administrators and largely mirror the overall rankings (correlations of 0.96 in 2016).

    Commentary

    Legal Education

    Measuring Law Faculty Scholarly Impact by Citations: Reliable and Valid for Collective Faculty Ranking

    Gregory Sisk

    ABSTRACT: No single metric of faculty scholarly activity can fully capture every individual contribution. For that reason, evaluating a single professor’s scholarly work requires a nuanced, multifaceted, and individually focused assessment. However, for a contemporary sketch of the collective scholarly impact of a law school faculty, citation measurements in the legal literature are both reliable and valid.

    Legal Education

    What Should Law School Rankings Measure and How Should We Measure It: A Comment on Heald and Sichelman’s Rankings

    Adam Chilton and Jonathan Masur

    ABSTRACT: There are obvious benefits to ranking academic departments based on objective measures of faculty research output. However, there are considerable difficulties associated with producing reliable and accurate rankings. In this short comment, we offer an evaluation of Heald and Sichelman's recent foray into the project of ranking law schools. Heald and Sichelman are to be commended for the transparency and rigor of their rankings effort. At the same time, it is important to note that their rankings involve a series of contestable discretionary choices and could give rise to potential counterproductive gaming by law schools seeking to improve their place in the rankings.

    Legal Education

    Measure for Measure: The Risks of Incorporating Citations Data Into U.S. News Rankings

    Gregory N. Mandel

    ABSTRACT: Paul Heald and Ted Sichelman’s Ranking the Academic Impact of 100 American Law Schools provides a rigorous analysis of law school faculties’ citation and download statistics. Their recommendation to incorporate these statistics into U.S. News & World Report’s annual law school rankings, however, appears misguided. Heald and Sichelman do not fully take into account the concerning gaming behavior and problematic incentives related to faculty hiring that such incorporation would likely produce over time.

    Comments

    Technology

    Stopping the Confusion: Why Widening the Preemption Gap Through the Parallel-Claims Exception Promotes Off-Label Uses of Medical Devices

    Leanne Hay

    ABSTRACT: This Comment discusses how the circuit split on medical device preemption impacts and curtails off-label usage of Class III medical devices. In some jurisdictions, this deepening circuit split, arising from the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the Medical Device Amendments to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, provides effective immunity from tort liability brought by plaintiffs injured by a medical device. The confusing landscape caused by the split has particularly affected off-label use of Class III medical devices. Off-label uses, widely utilized throughout the medical community, should be promoted by the courts as they ease administrative burden and encourage medical ingenuity.

    Letting Google into the Jury Room: A Proposed Study on the Effect of Abolishing the Juror Research Admonition

    Krislin C. Nuzum

    ABSTRACT: This Comment explores the juror research problem plaguing state and federal courts in the United States. The Digital Age has given society access to information at the tip of our fingers, causing humans to develop an inherent need for more information. This evolution in human nature directly conflicts with the court system today, which goes to great lengths to control the information received by the jury and to protect jurors from outside influence. Currently, all courts use one or more methods of deterring juror misconduct, including updated jury instructions, juror questions, juror monitoring, sequestration, cell phone bans, and juror punishment.