SSRN Tax Professor Download Rankings

SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 750 American and international law school faculties and 3,000 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN database.  Here is the new list (through January 11, 2012) 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 (Mich.)	22,911	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	5794
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	18,159	Ted Seto (Loyola-LA)	4895
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	17,964	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	4483
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	16,192	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3361
5	James Hines (Michigan)	15,179	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2817
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-LA)	14,160	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	2702
7	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	12,871	Jen Kowal (Loyola-LA)	2647
8	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	11,769	Herwig Schlunk (Vand.)	2492
9	David Walker (Boston U.)	11,110	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	2274
10	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	11,045	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2212
11	David Weisbach (Chicago)	10,816	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2172
12	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	10,550	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	1945
13	Herwig Schlunk (Vand.)	10,362	Francine Lipman (Chapman)	1864
14	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	10,072	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	1850
15	Ed McCaffery (USC)	9742	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1620
16	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	9630	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1561
17	Katie Pratt (Loyola-LA)	9556	James Hines (Michigan)	1531
18	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	9194	Jeffrey Maine (Maine)	1411
19	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	8626	Amy Monahan (Minnesota)	1350
20	Steve Bank (UCLA)	8595	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	1328
21	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	8455	John Miller (Idaho)	1322
22	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	8352	Allison Christians (Wisc.)	1319
23	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	8114	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1305
24	Michael Knoll (Penn)	7521	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1252
25	David Schizer (Columbia)	6889	Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	1184

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 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:

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