Updated SSRN Rankings of Tax Faculty

SSRN has updated its new monthly rankings of 225 American and international law school faculties and 1,500 American law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN data base.  Here is the new list (through November 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	82
Edward McCaffery (USC)	2	97	1	65
David Schizer (Columbia)	3	121	10	198
David Walker (BU)	4	125	12	257
David Weisbach (Chicago)	5	142	9	158
Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	6	146	3	83
Victor Fleischer (UCLA)	7	159	7	133
Steve Bank (UCLA)	8	160	6	117
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	9	171	4	96
Terrence Chorvat (George Mason)	10	183	5	110
Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	11	223	18	335
Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	12	340	11	220
Elizabeth Garreett (USC)	13	343	20	365
Samuel Thompson, Jr. (UCLA)	14	373	-	1357
Barbara Fried (Stanford)	15	383	-	645
Lee Anne Fennell (Illinois)	16	423	17	334
William Bradford (Princeton-NYU)	17	429	16	332
Jeff Strnad (Stanford)	18	430	19	339
Joseph Bankman (Stanford)	19	431	20	392
Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	20	453	13	280
Calvin Johnson (Texas)	21	469	-	665
Tanina Rostain (New York)	22	488	8	149
Kyle Logue (Michigan)	23	506	-	708
Kirk Stark (UCLA)	24	527	14	308
Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	25	549	24	530
Michael Asimow (UCLA)	-	554	-	694
Susan Hamill (Alabama)	-	673	15	327
James Repetti (BC)	-	748	25	622
Joseph Dodge (Florida State)	-	875	23	467
Hugh Ault (BC)	-	1021	22	422

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 forthcoming article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. ___ (2005) (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.  Bill Henderson (Indiana) thinks we are being too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.