Paul L. Caron
Dean





Wednesday, September 7, 2016

SSRN Tax Professor Rankings

SSRN LogoSSRN 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 September 1, 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 (Mich.)

58,913

Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)

10,432

2

Michael Simkovic (S. Hall)

33,576

Michael Simkovic (S. Hall)

4860

3

Paul Caron (Pepperdine)

31,985

D. Dharmapala (Chicago)

3544

4

D. Dharmapala (Chicago)

27,864

Paul Caron (Pepperdine)

2769

5

Louis Kaplow (Harvard)

26,435

Richard Ainsworth (BU)

2336

6

Vic Fleischer (San Diego)

22,843

Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)

2217

7

James Hines (Michigan)

22,048

Dan Shaviro (NYU)

2057

8

Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)

21,281

Ed Kleinbard (USC)

2032

9

Richard Kaplan (Illinois)

21,234

William Byrnes (Texas A&M)

2016

10

Ed Kleinbard (USC)

20,689

Nancy McLaughlin (Utah)

1967

11

Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)

19,198

Jeff Kwall (Loyola-Chicago)

1868

12

Richard Ainsworth (BU)

18,560

Chris Hoyt (UMKC)

1866

13

Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)

17,851

David Weisbach (Chicago)

1794

14

Carter Bishop (Suffolk)

17,234

Omri Marian (UC-Irvine)

1779

15

Brad Borden (Brooklyn)

17,206

Louis Kaplow (Harvard)

1749

16

David Weisbach (Chicago)

17,122

Vic Fleischer (San Diego)

1708

17

Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)

16,836

Steven Bank (UCLA)

1506

18

Chris Sanchirico (Penn)

16,680

Yariv Brauner (Florida)

1505

19

Francine Lipman (UNLV)

16,398

Jack Manhire (Texas A&M)

1419

20

Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)

16,167

Brad Borden (Brooklyn)

1407

21

Bridget Crawford (Pace)

15,873

Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)

1383

22

Dan Shaviro (NYU)

15,698

Francine Lipman (UNLV)

1362

23

David Walker (Boston Univ.)

15,231

Richard Kaplan (Illinos)

1329

24

Steven Bank (UCLA)

13,802

Jordan Barry (San Diego)

1213

25

Herwig Schlunk (Vanderbilt)

13,254

Stephen Shay (Harvard)

1203

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:

For Ted Seto's faculty-wide (and metropolitan area-wide) analysis of these SSRN tax rankings, see:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2016/09/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings.html

Scholarship, Tax, Tax Prof Rankings | Permalink

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