SSRN Tax Professor Rankings

SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 616 American and international law school faculties and 1,500 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN data base.  Here is the new list (through October 18, 2009) of the Top 25 U.S. Tax Professors in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and recent downloads (within the past 12 months):

		All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
1	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	14,041	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	3955
2	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	12,634	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	3135
3	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	12,623	James Hines (Michigan)	2348
4	James Hines (Michigan)	11,626	Bradley Borden (Washburn)	1921
5	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	8826	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1884
6	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	8286	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1692
7	David Walker (BU)	8206	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1681
8	David Weisbach (Chicago)	8030	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	1630
9	Ed McCaffery (USC)	8005	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1606
10	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	7709	Ruth Mason (Connecticut)	1575
11	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	7237	David Walker (BU)	1540
12	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	7034	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	1527
13	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	6715	Francine Lipman (Chapman)	1472
14	Steven Bank (UCLA)	6186	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	1393
15	David Schizer (Columbia)	5709	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1374
16	Francine Lipman (Chapman)	5588	Karen Burke (San Diego)	1354
17	Bradley Borden (Washburn)	5541	Michael Knoll (Penn)	1254
18	Michael Knoll (Penn)	5273	Ed McCaffery (USC)	1240
19	Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	4985	Tom Brennan (Northwestern)	1156
20	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	4958	Allison Christians (Wisconsin)	1134
21	Terrence Chorvat (G. Mason)	4508	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	1110
22	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	4304	Brian Galle (Florida State)	1064
23	Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	4103	Steven Bank (UCLA)	1062
24	Ruth Mason (Connecticut)	4089	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	1056
25	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	3942	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	1012

Note that this ranking includes full-time 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 article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006) (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 too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.

For my recent articles on what SSRN downloads can tell us about the current state and future of legal scholarship, and about the relationship between scholarship and blogging, see:

• The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 38 (2006)
• Are Scholars Better Bloggers? -- Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025 (2006)

For Ted Seto's faculty-wide (and metropolitan area-wide) analysis of these SSRN tax rankings, see:

• The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• The Top 15 Graduate Tax Faculties
• The Top 10 Tax Faculty Metro Areas