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Law School and Biddle Law Library celebrate 10 million legal scholarship downloads

December 02, 2021

In the past year alone, nearly two million papers have been downloaded from the Law School’s Legal Scholarship Repository.

On Wednesday, December 1, the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School reached the spectacular milestone of 10 million downloads by readers worldwide from the Biddle Law Library’s Legal Scholarship Repository.

This accomplishment speaks to the exceptional, pathbreaking scholarship produced by the Law School’s esteemed faculty and published in our seven highly-regarded journals. Comparatively, the Law School at Penn ranks as the 5th most-downloaded law school, both of all-time and in the past year.

On the library’s website, users can watch in real time as people around the world access scholarship from the Law School, which has been downloaded by over 100,000 unique institutions across 238 countries around the world since Biddle established the Repository in 2013.

In the past year alone, nearly two million papers were downloaded from the Repository. The most-downloaded paper in the Repository to date,The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communitiesby George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights Dorothy E. Roberts, has been downloaded over 32,000 times.

Scholarship Repository downloads constitute only one way in which law schools gauge and compare the reach and impact of their scholarship. The Law School’s collective SSRN statistics complement the recent Repository milestone. Current rankings denote that the Law School at Penn boasts the 8th most influential faculty in the country, with the top-10 most-cited faculty being, alphabetically:

Explore the latest work from the Law School’s esteemed faculty.