Law (Professor) Blog Ranking
posted by Dave Hoffman
[UPDATES IN RED] With the assistance of our intern, Sam Yospe, I decided to update the law blog ranking project first completed by Roger Alford at Opinio Juris. The following list ranks 41 law professor blogs according to traffic (as calculated by The Truth Laid Bear). To minimize distortion, we applied average monthly data, and ran the measurements about two weeks ago. This list only includes blogs that have at least one law professor as a regular blogger, and we exclude blogs that focus entirely on politics or current events, and blogs that are not tracked by Truth Laid Bear. Some blogs, like Patently-O, appear to be tracked only inconsistently by TLB and are not included in this list for the time being.
While this list ranks blogs by traffic, we have also included Truth Laid Bear’s own weighted rankings. TLB ranks blogs using an algorithm that accounts for a “link score,” a measure of how often blogs are linked to by other blogs. While the ranking by traffic that appears below and TLB’s ranking are related, the correlation appears to be statistically insigificant. For example, Bainbridge ‘s blog is ranked second by TLB amongst legal blogs. Yet, by traffic it ranks ninth. Conversely, Sentencing Law and Policy is the ranked third amongst all legal blogs in traffic, yet it ranked 2,164 by TLB, a lower ranking than some legal blogs that receive less traffic.
These data suggest that there is significant heterogeneity in the audience of legal blogs, as some blogs seem to have wide audiences of readers not shared by others, and (indeed) exist in entirely different communal spaces. This fractured audience finding challenges my flat traffic thesis. Importantly, this post does not intend to suggest a thing about the relative quality of the blogs ranked, nor those that are not mentioned. This isn’t even a popularity contest.
|
Blog | Hits | Rank |
| Volokh Conspiracy | 23,084 | 18 |
| Althouse | 12,204 | 153 |
| Sentencing Law and Policy | 4,066 | 2,164 |
| Balkinization | 3,727 | 781 |
| Tax Prof Blog | 3,619 | 3,298 |
| Concurring Opinions | 2,737 | 2,708 |
| Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports | 1,826 | 9,823 |
| BlackProf | 1,794 | 4,704 |
| Prawfsblawg | 1,785 | 2,799 |
| Professor Bainbridge | 1,683 | 94 |
| Sports Law Blog | 1,107 | 5,548 |
| Discourse.net | 1,062 | 2,875 |
| White Collar Crime Prof | 1,013 | 9,034 |
| Conglomerate | 871 | 3,268 |
| Opinio Juris | 839 | 16,066 |
| Is That Legal? | 699 | 2,770 |
| WorkPlace Prof | 673 | 9,972 |
| Chicago Law Faculty Blog | 619 | 5,991 |
| The Right Coast | 565 | 10,784 |
| IdeoBlog | 534 | 6,552 |
| CrimProf Blog | 512 | 8,857 |
| ImmigrationProf Blog | 453 | 8,142 |
| Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof | 445 | 25,058 |
| Election Law | 389 | 4,586 |
| MoneyLaw | 351 | 12,955 |
| Jurisdynamics | 349 | 12,943 |
| Ratio Juris | 348 | 33,169 |
| Empirical Legal Studies Blog | 323 | 2,224 |
| Religion Clause | 298 | 10,274 |
| Contracts Prof | 294 | 20,849 |
| Family Law Prof | 294 | 28,835 |
| Legal History Blog | 271 | 16,579 |
| Legal Profession Blog | 233 | 17,391 |
| Int’l Law and Economics Policy Blog | 200 | 24,350 |
| Sex Crimes | 199 | 12,459 |
| Truth on the Market | 192 | 10,114 |
| CrimLaw | 159 | 6,155 |
| PropertyProf | 148 | 23,140 |
| Madisonian | 143 | 9,969 |
| Antitrust Review | 131 | 19,096 |
| Mauled Again | 100 | 13,057 |
Interested in playing with the data? Download the file. Again, this post is was created with the really great help of Sam Yospe. Thanks, Sam!
July 30, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Posted in: Blogging, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Rankings)
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Responses (15)
TJ - July 27, 2007 at 5:42 pm
What about Patently-O by Dennis Crouch (Missouri)? It is run by a law professor, and I am sure gets more than 100 hits per day.
dave - July 27, 2007 at 5:46 pm
We’ll check and if there are errors will update soon.
dave - July 27, 2007 at 5:50 pm
TLB doesn’t appear to capture that blog so well:
http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://patentlaw.typepad.com
Probably because there is no sitemeter stats link on Professor Crouch’s site.
patentee - July 28, 2007 at 10:55 am
Here you go: http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://patentlyo.com.
Looks like Patently-O would fall right before Balkinization.
Mary Dudziak - July 28, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Thanks for doing this — this is interesting.
BlackProf was left out of the study, but it’s tracked by TLB: http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://blackprof.com.
If your blog isn’t included in the data, you can find out whether it’s tracked on TLB at this link: http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php
Dave Hoffman - July 28, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Thanks Mary. I encourage folks who got missed to post here. I’ll come back in a day or so and update the lists with any new entrants.
Bill Childs - July 29, 2007 at 8:14 am
TortsProf (part of the LawProfessorBlogs network) is at around 260 hits (170 visits) per day, but appers not to be tracked by TLB.
Regus Patoff - July 29, 2007 at 11:49 am
Crouch was a practitioner, not a prof, when he started Patently O, and presumably still worked at MBHB when TLB began his project.
Brian Tamanaha - July 30, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Where is “Mirror of Justice”?
(a terrific blog on Catholic Legal Theory)
dave hoffman - July 30, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I agree that MoJ is an amazing blog. But, like Patently-O, TLB appears to have trouble catching its traffic stats:
http://truthlaidbear.com/showdetails.php?host=http://mirrorofjustice.com
-Dave
Ann Bartow - July 30, 2007 at 2:49 pm
TTLB ranks Feminist Law Professors at #5802
or at least it did a few minutes when I used the search function here: http://truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php
Given the significantly right wing tilt of the blogger behind TTLB, I prefer not to give him Feminist Law Professor’s page load stats by signing up with that site. FLP does have a Stat Counter (which is somewhat more protective of reader and commenter privacy than Sitemeter) and is FLP is also ranked by Technorati. You can find links to both at the bottom of the FLP blog.
dave - July 30, 2007 at 2:58 pm
[Cross-posted from Feminist Law Profs, where this same discussion is ongoing]
Ann,
TTLB “ranks” FLP, but it does not list the traffic numbers, which is what our list is based on. For the same reason, we excluded patently-o.
Technorati offers, in my view, a very bad metric, because it includes blogroll links. Not that TLB offers a “good” system, just a convenient one, and one used by Roger in the previous posting on this topic on opinio juris.
dave
Ann Bartow - July 30, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Whoohee Dave, you need to read up on TTLB’s metrics. Here is one very dated overview:
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/2005/01/blog_ranking_metrics/
Here is a more recent take:
http://serandez.blogspot.com/2007/07/ecosystem-thoughts_11.html
Note the part that says: “I guess what surprises me most is that the rankings go strictly by the number of incoming links. Traffic plays no role in the TTLB rankings. (Technorati uses some combination of the two.)”
I was really surprised by that, because as evidenced by my comment in our discussion at FLP I thought TTLB used both links and page loads, as Technorati does. So I checked the TTLB website and the TTLB FAQ (http://truthlaidbear.com/FAQ.php) says:
“The TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem is an application which scans weblogs and generates a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.”
There is a completely independent “Ecotraffic” counter that TTLB will use to republish Sitemeter data if you are not concerned about reader/commenter privacy issues. I am.
dave - July 30, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Ann.
But this is why we reported both numbers. TLB makes it easy to see what traffic scores are, and then offers a measure to compare with.
I myself am not clear whether incoming traffic, links, or technorati’s total link score, is more “reliable” as a measure of influence/popularity/or what have you. And I’d be pleased if this post motivated folks to come up with their own lists – indeed, that is why I asked Sam to make the list in an excel file which you can download and play with. Or simply make up your own. The point of this post was not to make any claims about quality, as I expressly said. Indeed, I thought one of the neat things that this analysis may have exposed is that the various law blogs are flourishing in entirely different communities of readers.
-DAH.
Ann Bartow - July 30, 2007 at 5:41 pm
The point of my reaction was, at least at first, to note that you have completely excluded law prof blogs that eschew turning over our reader information to a pseudonymous right wing blogger.
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