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.  This ranking includes downloads from two 30- and 35-page papers by 12 tax professors on the new tax legislation that garnered a lot of media attention (including the New York Times and Washington Post) and generated a massive amount of downloads (the papers are the most downloaded papers over the past 12 months across all of SSRN and the most downloaded tax papers of all-time by over 200%).  See Brian Leiter (Chicago), 11 Tax Profs Blow Up The SSRN Download Rankings. (For some reason, Mitchell Kane (NYU) — the twelfth academic co-author of the two papers — is not included in the SSRN download rankings (although the downloads are included on his individual author page)).  Here is the new list (through  April 1, 2018) 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.)	162,345	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	94,878
2	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	102,395	Daniel Hemel (Chicago)	89,272
3	David Gamage (Indiana)	97,539	David Gamage (Indiana)	86,498
4	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	97,493	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	85,438
5	Daniel Hemel (Chicago)	92,522	Manoj Viswanathan (Hastings)	84,622
6	Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)	91,692	Lily Batchelder (NYU)	84,594
7	Cliff Fleming (BYU)	89,424	Darien Shanske (UC-Davis)	84,544
8	David Kamin (NYU)	85,789	Cliff Fleming (BYU)	84,268
9	Rebecca Kysar (Brooklyn)	85,480	David Kamin (NYU)	83,610
10	Manoj Viswanathan (Hastings)	84,703	Ari Glogower (Ohio State)	83,605
11	Ari Glogower (Ohio State)	83,815	Rebecca Kysar (Brooklyn)	83,283
12	Michael Simkovic (USC)	39,415	Gladriel Shobe (BYU)	23,060
13	Paul Caron (Pepperdine)	34,293	D. Dharmapala (Chicago)	3,558
14	D. Dharmapala (Chicago)	33,970	Richard Ainsworth (BU)	3,467
15	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	29,458	Michael Simkovic (USC)	3,465
16	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	24,557	Kyle Rozema (Chicago)	2,971
17	Vic Fleischer (San Diego)	24,519	Hugh Ault (Boston College)	2,529
18	Richard Ainsworth (BU)	23,857	Omri Marian (UC-Irvine)	2,414
19	Jim Hines (Michigan)	23,657	Stephen Shay (Harvard)	2,286
20	Gladriel Shobe (NYU)	23,578	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	2,158
21	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	22,769	Sam Donaldson (Georgia St.)	2,117
22	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	22,648	Jacon Goldin (Stanford)	2,099
23	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	21,101	Ruth Mason (Virginia)	1,966
24	David Weisbach (Chicago)	20,227	William Byrnes (Texas A&M)	1,815
25	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	20,061	Shu-Yi Oei (Boston College)	1,805

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: 

• 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.

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:

• The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• The Top 15 Graduate Tax Faculties
• The Top 10 Tax Faculty Metro Areas