What do Mathematician Paul Erdos and Legal Scholar Cass Sunstein have in common?

Paul Edelman, a professor of mathematics and law at Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt law professor Tracey George have recently completed a working paper examining collaboration networks in legal scholarship.  They were inspired, in part, by Erdos numbers in mathematics:  Paul Erdos was a brilliant and influential mathematician who co-authored articles with a large number of scholars.   Mathematicians now talk about their degrees of separation from Erdos as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics.  The Edelman/George paper attempts to identify a legal Erdos as a way of examining collaboration networks in law.  They ultimately conclude that Cass Sunstein is the legal Erdos, and then identify the Sunstein 1s and 2s.  The paper is intended to be a fun yet informative study of collaboration in law, building on work that Vanderbilt Law Professor Chris Guthrie and Tracey George have done on that subject. 

 

Edelman and George have attempted to correctly name all of Sunstein's co-authors (1s) and those co-authors' co-authors (2s), but they may have missed some and/or misspelled/misidentified others.  Thus,  the paper is posted on SSRN with a note requesting corrections and additions (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1000689). 

The authors are curious to hear from people who are Sunstein 3s and 4s as they stopped short of collecting that information given the tremendous amount of resources required to do so.  Since many Sunstein 1s and 2s (and likely 3s and 4s) are ELS Blog readers, feel free to email the authors with any relevant information/corrections/additions.

The Abstract of the Paper is below the fold: 

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means a scholar did not co-author with Erdős but did collaborate with someone who did (i.e., an Erdős 1). In this study, we examine collaboration networks in law, searching for the Legal Erdős. We crown Sunstein as the Legal Erdős and name a complete (as possible) list of Sunstein 1s and 2s.