SSRN Rankings of Tax Faculty

It is the season of law school rankings. U.S. News & World Report will publish its annual rankings on Friday (we offered an early peek yesterday here).  Our symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings will be held at Indiana-Bloomington on April 15.  And last week, SSRN unveiled a new feature that ranks 200 American and international law school faculties and 1,000 American law professors by (among other things) the number of downloads of their papers from the SSRN data base. I will have much more to say on this blog about the SSRN rankings shortly as Bernie Black (Texas), the Managing Director of SSRN, and I are writing an article for the Indiana symposium on the uses and limits of SSRN in measuring scholarly performance.

In the meantime, I thought it would be interesting for readers of this blog to see the list of the Top 25 Tax Faculty in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and new downloads (within the past 12 months):

SSRN Rankings of Top 25 Tax Faculty
	All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
Tax Faculty (School)	Tax Rank	Overall Rank	Tax Rank	Overall Rank
Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1	38	2	71
David Schizer (Columbia)	2	96	7	139
David Walker (Boston University)	3	98	11	203
Edward McCaffery (USC)	4	101	1	58
David Weisbach (Chicago)	5	124	10	189
Steven Bank (UCLA)	6	153	4	95
Victor Fleischer (UCLA)	7	161	9	180
Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	8	162	3	87
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	9	180	5	112
Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	10	192	14	216
Terrence Chorvat (Geo. Mason)	11	204	6	119
Sam Thompson (UCLA)	12	255	-	863
Elizabeth Garrett (USC)	13	275	13	207
Barbara Fried (Stanford)	14	283	19	322
Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	15	332	12	205
William Bradford (Princeton-NYU)	16	338	8	168
Calvin Johnson (Texas)	17	358	22	396
Kyle Logue (Michigan)	18	382	-	519
Jeff Strnad (Stanford)	19	390	15	278
Michael Asimow (UCLA)	20	411	21	353
Joseph Bankman (Stanford)	21	441	25	468
Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	22	464	-	651
Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	23	469	24	430
William Klein (UCLA)	24	476	-	505
Herwig Schlunk (Vanderbilt)	25	483	-	958
Anthony Infanti (Pittsburgh)	-	519	20	344
Kirk Stark (UCLA)	-	523	18	318
Jim Repetti (Boston College)	-	630	16	298
Michael Knoll (Pennsylvania)	-	698	17	318
Linda Sugin (Fordham)	-	811	23	404

Note that this ranking includes 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 the Indiana symposium piece is that the SSRN data can play a role in faculty rankings along with these other measures.