Top 25 Most Cited Contract Law Articles Published in the Last 25 Years — Ted Sichelman

Post by Ted Sichelman, University of San Diego School of Law

(A description of the methodology used to construct this list follows the table.)

[Editor note: links to ungated versions added—Yonathan Arbel]

I first performed a search in HeinOnline to retrieve all law journal articles published since 1990, ordered by citation count. Then, I reviewed the title of the 1600 most-cited law review articles and the content of those articles that could plausibly be classified in the area of “contracts,” including theory. I excluded articles primarily in secured transactions and lending, cyberlaw, intellectual property, and remedies (though I included a few articles that could plausibly be classified in these fields but focused on contract law or theory). Of course, some of these determinations required judgment, but no more than a few of the articles were close calls in my view.

Note that the citation counts only reflect citations to published law review articles, and not books, cases, practitioner materials, unpublished articles, non-law articles, and other sources. As a check for one of my earlier posts, Most Cited Private Law Articles Published in the Last 25 Years, I ran about ten articles through Lexis and generally found the citation counts on HeinOnline were within 15% of article-specific counts tabulated in Lexis’s “Law Review and Journals” category, so it does not appear that the rankings would change much using Lexis or similar databases.

Last, I only report total citations, which biases the rankings towards older articles. However, I plan to update this list annually, so more recent articles that are highly cited will appear in later iterations.

I apologize in advance for any errors or omissions—if you believe an article should be included, please let me know (tsichelman@sandiego.edu), and I’ll do my best to promptly make any deserving corrections.