« Johnston: Scary New Wage Data | Main | Abrams: Economic Substance and the Partnership Anti-Abuse Rule »
October 26, 2010
SSRN Tax Professor Rankings
SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 663 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 16, 2010) 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 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) |
17,209 |
Herwig Schlunk (Vanderbilt) |
6272 |
|
2 |
Louis Kaplow (Harvard) |
15,514 |
Paul Caron (Cincinnati) |
6239 |
|
3 |
Vic Fleischer (Colorado) |
14,165 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) |
4597 |
|
4 |
Paul Caron (Cincinnati) |
13,942 |
Katherine Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) |
3862 |
|
5 |
James Hines (Michigan) |
13,276 |
Carter Bishop (Suffolk) |
3858 |
|
6 |
Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis) |
10,465 |
Jennifer Kowal (Loyola-L.A.) |
3579 |
|
7 |
Chris Sanchirico (Penn) |
9740 |
Francine Lipman (Chapman) |
2574 |
|
8 |
David Walker (BU) |
9580 |
Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis) |
2181 |
|
9 |
David Weisbach (Chicago) |
9312 |
Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.) |
1865 |
|
10 |
Ed McCaffery (USC) |
8900 |
Richard Kaplan (Illinois) |
1859 |
|
11 |
Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.) |
8899 |
James Hines (Michigan) |
1694 |
|
12 |
Richard Kaplan (Illinois) |
8564 |
Bradley Borden (Brooklyn) |
1646 |
|
13 |
Francine Lipman (Chapman) |
8162 |
Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore) |
1626 |
|
14 |
Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) |
8150 |
Daniel Shaviro (NYU) |
1618 |
|
15 |
Steven Bank (UCLA) |
7444 |
Bridget Crawford (Pace) |
1585 |
|
16 |
Herwig Schlunk (Vanderbilt) |
7347 |
Martin J. McMahon, Jr. (Florida) |
1574 |
|
17 |
Carter Bishop (Suffolk) |
7226 |
Allison Christians (Wisconsin) |
1559 |
|
18 |
Bradley Borden (Brooklyn) |
7183 |
Vic Fleischer (Colorado) |
1533 |
|
19 |
Daniel Shaviro (NYU) |
6598 |
Louis Kaplow (Harvard) |
1531 |
|
20 |
Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore) |
6579 |
David Walker (BU) |
1385 |
|
21 |
David Schizer (Columbia) |
6241 |
Ruth Mason (Connecticut) |
1345 |
|
22 |
Michael Knoll (Penn) |
6236 |
David Weisbach (Chicago) |
1302 |
|
23 |
Katherine Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) |
6104 |
Steven Bank (UCLA) |
1260 |
|
24 |
Bridget Crawford (Pace) |
5878 |
Joshua Blank (NYU) |
1260 |
|
25 |
Ruth Mason (Connecticut) |
5429 |
Daniel Simmons (UC-Davis) |
1245 |
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:
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 other 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:
October 26, 2010 in Law School Rankings, Legal Education, Tax, Tax Prof Rankings | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c4eab53ef0133f557c20c970b
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference SSRN Tax Professor Rankings:
Comments
Aren't those rankings merely an indicator of the timeliness of professors' research papers and the breadth of their subjects, as well as their sheer volume of productivity? I have often noticed summary-style papers in the top 5 downloads for any given period. Surely those do not reflect excellence in scholarship.
Personally I would much rather see professors expend their precious time and energy on research subjects that have value to those in the real world, and stop flooding us with papers on distributive justice and other topics that play well in the echo chamber of academia but fall flat anywhere else...
Posted by: Todd | Oct 26, 2010 10:23:54 AM
Paul: Do you generate these rankings manually? I don't see any was on SSRN's site to break down the top law author list by legal specialty. If you generate them manually, how do you decide who is and who isn't a tax professor? Some folks (like my friend and co author Bill Klein) combine tax and, say, corporate. Steve
Posted by: Steve Bainbridge | Oct 26, 2010 9:21:02 PM
I like it- moving toward a more resonable objective criteria rather than random subjective guess. Bias? Even U.S. News which claims "objective criteria" has built in bias. One example is the volume of books in a library. When I was at Harvard, they counted the Southern Reporter 4-5 times as they would have zillions of the same book in the library-hence a larger library-hence a higher rating-but in any event the objective criteria is better- like the one used above.
Posted by: Nick Paleveda MBA J.D. LL.M | Oct 27, 2010 10:26:39 AM
