Updated SSRN Rankings of Tax Faculty

SSRN has updated its new monthly rankings of 200 American and international law school faculties and 1,000 American law professors by (among other things) the number of downloads of their papers from the SSRN data base.  Here is the new list (through August 1, 2005) of the Top 25 Tax Faculty in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and new downloads (within the past 12 months):

Top 25 Tax Faculty SSRN Rankings
	All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
Tax Faculty (School)	Tax Rank	Overall Rank	Tax Rank	Overall Rank
Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1	45	2	83
Edward McCaffery (USC)	2	102	1	53
David Schizer (Columbia)	3	116	7	175
David Walker (BU)	4	121	11	236
David Weisbach (Chicago)	5	149	13	247
Steven Bank (UCLA)	6	159	3	118
Victor Fleischer (UCLA)	7	171	6	174
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	8	188	4	123
Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	9	190	10	226
Terrence Chorvat (George Mason)	10	212	5	138
Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	11	220	12	238
Sam Thompson (UCLA)	12	346	-	1277
Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	13	349	9	209
Elizabeth Garrett (UCLA)	14	351	15	291
Barbara Fried (Stanford)	15	368	24	540
William Bradford (Princeton-NYU)	16	428	16	334
Jeff Strnad (Stanford)	17	431	14	278
Calvin Johnson (Texas)	18	458	-	660
Kyle Logue (Michigan)	19	517	-	802
Michael Asimow (UCLA)	20	529	22	501
Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	21	532	-	596
Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	22	540	19	398
Joseph Bankman (Stanford)	23	545	-	772
Tanina Rostain (New York)	24	575	8	207
Kirk Stark (UCLA)	25	585	17	366
Anthony Infanti (Pittsburgh)	-	617	20	434
David Duff (Toronto)	-	629	18	389
Jim Repetti (Boston College)	-	722	21	452
Linda Sugin (Fordham)	-	999	23	537
Gregg Polsky (Minnesota)	-	789	25	588

Note that this ranking includes tax professors with at least one tax paper on SSRN, and all papers (including non-tax papers) by these tax professors are included in the SSRN data.

The other SSRN ranking categories are:

• All-Time Papers
• New Papers
• All-Time Downloads Per Paper
• New Downloads Per Paper

These rankings, of course, are imperfect measures of faculty scholarly performance -- as are the existing ranking methodologies of reputation surveys, productivity counts, and citation counts. Our modest claim in our piece for the Indiana Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings is that the SSRN data can play a role in faculty rankings along with these other measures.