Thursday, January 28, 2016
SSRN Tax Professor 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 January 3, 2016) 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 |
Recent |
||
|
1 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) |
52,118 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) |
8947 |
|
2 |
Paul Caron (Pepperdine) |
30,103 |
Michael Simkovic (Seton Hall) |
4604 |
|
3 |
Michael Simkovic (Seton Hall) |
30,085 |
D. Dharmapala (Chicago) |
3880 |
|
4 |
D. Dharmapala (Chicago) |
25,319 |
Paul Caron (Pepperdine) |
2617 |
|
5 |
Louis Kaplow (Harvard) |
25,252 |
Richard Ainsworth (BU) |
2150 |
|
6 |
Vic Fleischer (San Diego) |
21,835 |
Ed Kleinbard (USC) |
2073 |
|
7 |
James Hines (Michigan) |
21,344 |
Louis Kaplow (Harvard) |
1845 |
|
8 |
Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.) |
20,482 |
Jeff Kwall (Loyola-Chicago) |
1825 |
|
9 |
Richard Kaplan (Illinois) |
20,115 |
Gregg Polsky (N. Carolina) |
1816 |
|
10 |
Ed Kleinbard (USC) |
19,193 |
Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) |
1722 |
|
11 |
Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) |
18,223 |
Dan Shaviro (NYU) |
1539 |
|
12 |
Richard Ainsworth (BU) |
16,883 |
Brad Borden (Brooklyn) |
1499 |
|
13 |
Carter Bishop (Suffolk) |
16,537 |
Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) |
1480 |
|
14 |
Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) |
16,210 |
Chris Hoyt (UMKC) |
1471 |
|
15 |
Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.) |
16,094 |
Omri Marian (UC-Irvine) |
1460 |
|
16 |
Chris Sanchirico (Penn) |
16,010 |
Vic Fleischer (San Diego) |
1396 |
|
17 |
Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis) |
15,855 |
Chris Sanchirico (Penn) |
1389 |
|
18 |
Brad Borden (Brooklyn) |
15,821 |
Nancy McLaughlin (Utah) |
1349 |
|
19 |
David Weisbach (Chicago) |
15,727 |
Jack Manhire (Texas A&M) |
1333 |
|
20 |
Francine Lipman (UNLV) |
15,471 |
Francine Lipman (UNLV) |
1229 |
|
21 |
Bridget Crawford (Pace) |
15,000 |
Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.) |
1186 |
|
22 |
David Walker (BU) |
14,708 |
Ruth Mason (Virginia) |
1167 |
|
23 |
Dan Shaviro (NYU) |
14,237 |
Jordan Barry (San Diego) |
1125 |
|
24 |
Herwig Schlunk (Vanderbilt) |
13,009 |
James Hines (Michigan) |
1083 |
|
25 |
Steven Bank (UCLA) |
12,592 |
Dick Harvey (Villanova) |
1068 |
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:
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:
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/01/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings.html
3,000 law professors. Huh. Before the downturn in 2010 (the existence of which some of these highly-ranked profs are still trying to deny), there were more than 17,000 law professors. Just saying.
Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Jan 28, 2016 8:32:26 AM