The Intruder

Diary Entry: December 24, 2024

I spent the entire morning looking at citation lists, specifically Fred Shapiro’s rankings, and I can’t shake the feeling that a massive practical joke has been played on the American legal academy. Everyone keeps repeating the dogma: Ronald Coase wrote the most cited law review article of all time. It’s become a sort of cocktail party factoid for 1Ls. But the more I dig into the genealogy of this fame, the more suspicious the title becomes.

I went back to Shapiro’s original 1985 study today. It’s fascinating. In that first iteration, Coase isn’t even there. He was deliberately excluded. Shapiro threw him out because The Problem of Social Cost wasn’t published in a “law review” in the traditional sense; it was in the Journal of Law and Economics. This isn’t just a bibliographic technicality; it feels like a smoking gun regarding Coase’s identity. He wasn’t a lawyer. He didn’t even pretend to be one. He was a British economist.

So, why the shift? Why did Shapiro eventually have to capitulate in the 1996 list and crown Coase the king?

I think the answer lies in the strangeness of the article itself. I was re-reading The Problem of Social Cost this afternoon, trying to read it not as a sacred text, but just as a piece of writing. It’s bizarrely un-legal. It doesn’t read like the other heavy hitters on the list — Gunther, Wechsler, Bork. Those men write like architects of doctrine; they are obsessed with the Supreme Court, with precedent, with the machinery of the American state. Coase writes like an old English judge delivering a monologue in a quiet room. There are no endless string cites. There is no desperate attempt to fit into a statutory framework.

It makes me wonder if the “most cited” title is actually a symptom of an intellectual invasion. Coase didn’t write a law review article; he wrote an economic manifesto that happened to dismantle the way lawyers think about liability.

The irony is palpable. You have this list of American legal giants — Harvard, Yale, Berkeley graduates — writing about Equal Protection and Privacy. And sitting on top of them all is a man who started out looking at the British postal service and radio frequencies.

I’m starting to see that Coase is an anomaly. He is an outsider who walked into the cathedral of American Law, looked up at the stained glass, and with a straight face asked if we couldn't just sell them off and replace them with cheap plastic to cut costs. The lawyers are still reeling from the question. The “most cited” title isn’t an honorific; it’s a scar left by the collision of two different worlds.