Tax as Vermont Avenue in Monopoly

Following up on Friday's post on the Ten Most-Cited Tax Faculty:  Roger Alford (Pepperdine) has a great post on the Monopoly Board of Citation Rankings:

If you're in the "wrong" neighborhood, a citation value of 250 is phenomenal. If you're in a really nice neighborhood, a citation value of 250 is good. But if you're in the best neighborhood, a citation value of 250 is, well, respectable. Leiter’s findings strongly reinforce the common perception that it is much easier to be viewed as successful if you publish in certain specialties rather than others. That is, it is far easier to be cited frequently if you are a constitutional law or business law scholar and far more difficult to be cited frequently if you write about tax, labor, or heaven forbid, trusts & estates.

Roger ranks the number of citations for the 10th most cited person in each of the 18 legal specialties tracked by Brian Leiter:  "Caveat: The 10th spot is not a perfect indicator of specialty ranking, but it offers a decent estimate of how a star (rather than a superstar) might fare in each specialty."

Tax ranks 16th of the 18 categories, with the 240 citations of the 10th most-cited tax scholar (a tie between Anne Alstott and Larry Lokken) placing tax as the Vermont Avenue on the Monopoly Board of Citation Rankings, above only Deborah Malamud's 230 citations in Labor & Employment Law (Oriental Avenue) and Mark Ascher's 90 citations in Wills, Trusts & Estates (Mediterranean Avenue).  In contrast, Constitutional Law is Boardwalk, with 1,640 citations for the 10th-ranked scholar (a tie between Richard Fallon and Robert Post).