This is the second post related to our recently released paper Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate. We believe a hierarchical depiction of the network helps uncover latent distribution of authority present in the law professor network. Specifically, between 10-15 law schools are responsible socializing a significant percentage of the future legal academics.
This extreme skewing of social authority presented in the visualization is also displayed in the above log-log of the degree distribution. While the -1.93 alpha level and size of the network falls outside the traditional power law/scale free range, the plot above does demonstrate the extreme skewing of social authority among institutions of legal education.
This is the time of year when there is significant discussion of the US News Rankings. We believe there is a wide-class of available data—data which could be characterized as the revealed preferences of important actors within the American legal system. For example, we have previous offered information on how judges select clerks from law schools? Now, we offer some empirical insight into how hiring committees vote over various institutions?
Coming later in the week, we will offer a Netlogo GUI which allows a user to start ideas at various institutions and observe how many generations they take to spread from institution to institution. There are significant caveats in the interpretation of our model but we think many people will still find it interesting. Please stay tuned and as always please tell your friends and colleagues about the CLS Blog!