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 July 1, 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.)	25,972	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	5758
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	19,861	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	5272
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	19,087	Ted Seto (Loyola-LA)	5223
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	16,892	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3217
5	James Hines (Michigan)	16,263	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2687
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-LA)	15,348	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2624
7	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	13,702	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2612
8	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	12,463	Jen Kowal (Loyola-LA)	2500
9	David Walker (Boston U.)	11,879	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	2334
10	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	11,686	Herwig Schlunk (Vand.)	2305
11	David Weisbach (Chicago)	11,635	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	2034
12	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	11,498	Christopher Hoyt (UMKC)	1980
13	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	11,323	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1967
14	Herwig Schlunk (Vand.)	11,032	David Gamage (UCBerkeley)	1841
15	Katie Pratt (Loyola-LA)	10,966	James Hines (Michigan)	1823
16	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	10,142	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1758
17	Ed McCaffery (USC)	10,138	Adam Chodorow (Ariz. St.)	1646
18	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	10,046	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1641
19	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	9937	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	1620
20	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	9651	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	1596
21	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	9447	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	1530
22	Steve Bank (UCLA)	9103	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	1510
23	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	9018	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1453
24	Michael Knoll (Penn)	8000	Marty McMahon (Florida)	1361
25	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	7939	Heather Field (UC-Hastings)	1256

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