Seto on The Top 25 Tax Faculties

As regular readers of this blog know, I prepare a weekly ranking of the Top 5 New Tax Papers, as well as a monthly ranking of the Top 25 Tax Professors, as measured by the number of SSRN downloads.  Theodore P. Seto (Loyola-L.A.) has gone a step further and prepared a study for publication here, SSRN Tax Faculty Downloads by Law School and City.  I will share the results of this study over the next three days.

In today's installment, Ted ranks the Top 25 U.S. Law School Tax Faculties, as measured by the number of SSRN downloads (through 7/1/06):

Note: Because of his recent move, Victor Fleischer's downloads are credited to Colorado rather than to UCLA.  Ted's conclusion:

SSRN downloads are, of course, only one measure of scholarly productivity and impact, and scholarship is certainly not the only relevant measure of the quality of a law faculty. With these qualifications, however, it’s pretty clear who comes out on top: UCLA’s tax faculty rocks. (If Louis Kaplow’s non-tax works are excluded, UCLA heads both lists.)

Ted Seto's 3-Part Study of Tax Faculties:

• Today:  The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• Thursday:  The Top Graduate Tax Faculties
• Friday:  The Top 10 Tax Faculties By Metropolitan Region

For more on the use of SSRN downloads in law school rankings, see Bernard S. Black & Paul L. Caron, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006). For more details about Ted's study, see below the fold:

For purpose of this analysis, a tax professor is defined as any law professor at a U.S. law school (1) self-identifying with one of the tax categories in the 2005-2006 AALS faculty listing, (2) who has posted at least one tax or tax-related article in abstract or full text on SSRN. Paul Caron’s listing of 2006-2007 new hires and lateral transfers is also reflected. As is true of Paul Caron’s ranking of individual tax professors, downloads of all SSRN postings of any tax professor, so defined, are then tallied.