Updated SSRN Tax Rankings

SSRN has updated its new monthly rankings of 342 American and international law school faculties and 1,500 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN data base.  Here is the new list (through July 1, 2006) of the Top 25 Tax Faculty in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and new downloads (within the past 12 months):

Top 25 Tax Faculty SSRN Rankings
	All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
Tax Faculty (School)	Tax Rank	Overall Rank	Tax Rank	Overall Rank
Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1	45	3	77
Edward McCaffery (USC)	2	91	6	110
David Walker (BU)	3	118	11	182
Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	4	121	1	64
Victor Fleischer (UCLA)	5	122	2	75
David Schizer (Columbia)	6	126	19	329
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	7	139	4	87
David Weisbach (Chicago)	8	142	8	157
Steve Bank (UCLA)	9	145	7	143
Terrence Chorvat (George Mason)	10	156	5	97
Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	11	209	18	314
Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	12	276	13	245
Elizabeth Garrett (USC)	13	321	22	419
Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	14	350	10	172
Lee Anne Fennell (Illinois)	15	364	15	285
Stephen Cohen (Georgetown)	16	370	12	190
Barbara Fried (Stanford)	17	389	-	901
Joseph Bankman (Stanford)	17	389	16	286
Sam Thompson (UCLA)	19	399	-	1605
Jeff Strnad (Stanford)	20	405	25	516
Susan Pace Hamill (Alabama)	21	419	9	162
Kirk Stark (UCLA)	22	425	20	339
Tanina Rostain (New York)	23	433	14	263
Calvin Johnson (Texas)	24	462	-	751
Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	25	466	24	507
Kyle Logue (Michigan)	-	473	-	617
Anthony Infanti (Pittsburgh)	-	581	23	423
Michael Knoll (Pennsylvania)	-	515	17	300
David Duff (Toronto)	-	528	21	394
Michael Asimow (UCLA)	-	547	-	751

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 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.