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 November 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.)	27,520	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	5382
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	20,865	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	4132
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	19,700	Adam Chodorow (Ariz. St.)	3997
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	17,405	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3231
5	James Hines (Michigan)	16,863	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2673
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	15,985	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2572
7	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	15,654	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	2492
8	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	13,932	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	2451
9	David Walker (Boston U.)	12,275	Herwig Schlunck (Vand.)	2319
10	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	12,253	David Gamage (UCBerkeley)	2230
11	David Weisbach (Chicago)	12,147	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	2189
12	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	11,945	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	2184
13	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	11,806	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2150
14	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	11,625	James Hines (Michigan)	1953
15	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	11,476	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1939
16	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	10,727	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1848
17	Herwig Schlunck (Vand.)	10,673	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	1530
18	Ed McCaffery (USC)	10,589	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1521
18	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	10,517	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	1501
20	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	10,369	Heather Field (UC-Hastings)	1444
21	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	9976	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1441
22	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	9456	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	1417
23	Steve Bank (UCLA)	9390	David Walker (Boston U.)	1349
24	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	8513	Allison Christians (McGill)	1333
25	Michael Knoll (Penn)	8392	Christopher Hoyt (UMKC)	1332

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