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Was Obama a Lousy President of the HLR?

Paul Caron:

In a comment on David Bernstein’s post on Barack Obama’s tenure as President of the Harvard Law Review for Volume 104, LawStatMan reports that the volume “has been cited [by law reviews] at the lowest rate of any volume published over the past twenty years”—170/year v. 262/year for vols. 101-13, 105-18.  The full stats are available here.  Although some have siezed on this data to argue that Obama was “a lousy president of the Harvard Law Review,” I agree with Mitch Rubinstein that “the amount of times a volume Obama edited is totally irrelevant to his Presidential bid. It says nothing about his qualifications to be President. It also says nothing about his ability to be a lawyer or law professor.”

Yes, yes, and no. If cite counts are appropriate to figure out how influential a law professor is, why not use them to measure the significance of a law review and its top editor? Granted, it’s a collective product, and some of the articles in that volume may have been selected by the prior board, but if the buck stops at the top, Obama deserves some aliquot of the blame for what appears to have been a less successful volume than usual for the HLR.

Update: Glenn Reynolds opines:

WAS OBAMA A LOUSY PRESIDENT—of the Harvard Law Review? The evidence presented is unpersuasive.