Mason School of Law [1] graduates taking the Virginia Bar Exam for the first time achieved a 100 percent pass rate for the February 2012 sitting of the exam. While Mason Law’s Virginia Bar Exam pass rates for first-time takers have consistently bested the state average every year since 2002, this is the first time that the school has achieved a perfect pass rating for first-time takers.
A recent study on the scholarly impact of law faculties has ranked Mason’s School of Law faculty 21st.
[2]The study, which was released by the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota, included all law schools accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) and calculated a scholarly impact score using the mean and median of total law journal citations over the past five years to the work of tenured members of each school’s faculty.
The 10 most-cited Mason faculty members were listed in the study alphabetically were David Bernstein, Henry Butler, Eric Claeys, Michael Greve, Bruce Kobayashi, Nelson Lund, Adam Mossoff, Timothy Muris, Ilya Somin, and Todd Zywicki.
In the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) July 1 published rankings, Mason Law faculty ranked 23rd among 279 institutions whose principal language of instruction is English in terms of number of downloads of scholarly articles. SSRN is the leading online library of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities.
Leading the law faculty in total SSRN new downloads over the past 12 months and over all time, alphabetically, were David Bernstein, Bruce Kobayashi, Ilya Somin, Joshua Wright, and Todd Zywicki. In addition, Wright and Somin ranked in the top 5 percent of the 2,992 authors tracked by SSRN.
—Donna Sneed and James Greif, MPA ’07