Law-school blogs are burning with reaction to the latest rankings of the 10 most cited professors in each of 18 categories.

Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin who recently announced his move to the University of Chicago Law School, posted the rankings on his widely-read law-schools blog.

Critics say that counting the number of citations in legal journals is a poor way to measure scholarly impact. For one thing, they argue, the rankings don’t do justice to scholars who do interdisciplinary and international work and whose names therefore don’t pop up as frequently in Westlaw JLR. That database, they say, is strictly for legal publications, most of which are based in the United States.

Mr. Leiter, who made the No. 10 spot in his own rankings in the law-and-philosophy category with 410 citations, strikes back. He says that the database is broader than his critics let on, and that the study “is a ‘true measure’ of what it purports to measure, namely, scholarly impact in legal scholarship.”

While Mr. Leiter argues that his rankings are superior to the much-maligned U.S. News & World Report list, Brian Tamanaha, a law professor at St. Johns University, disagrees. “Our culture suffers from a ferocious ranking fetish,” Mr. Tamanaha says. “Leiter’s citation study feeds the beast, when we should instead be starving it.”