Blogosphere Reaction to SSRN Rankings Paper

The release of our paper, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, on SSRN attracted quite a bit of attention yesterday in the blogosphere:

• Stephen Bainbridge at ProfessorBainbridge.com:
  • Interesting stuff.
• Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy:
  • I am very skeptical about using SSRN to measure performance, whether of individual faculty members or faculties as a whole. Still, the paper has lots of very interesting tidbits for SSRN followers out there.
• Brian Leiter at Leiter's Law School Reports:
  • SSRN downloads ... bear, in many instances, a stronger relationship to faculty quality than, say, U.S. News. And one consequence of creating the SSRN rankings will be that more faculty will be inspired to put their papers on SSRN--and that's a good thing, independent of any ranking. The important story about SSRN ... is that it may, in fact, be on the verge of supplanting law review publication altogether.
• Larry Ribstein at Ideoblog:
  • I agree that SSRN downloads are a relevant statistic. But it has holes, as do each of the alternatives. So why not a composite statistic for each faculty, which would then be aggregated into faculty quality? Combining the data and adding total publications would yield a useful third statistic.