Tuesday, December 10, 2019
SSRN Tax Professor Rankings
SSRN has updated its monthly ranking 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 2017 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 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 December 1, 2019) 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) | 187,160 | Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) | 8,109 |
| 2 | Dan Shaviro (NYU) | 119,716 | David Kamin (NYU) | 5,766 |
| 3 | David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.) | 115,552 | Lily Batchelder (NYU) | 5,753 |
| 4 | Lily Batchelder (NYU) | 114,993 | Daniel Hemel (Chicago) | 5,600 |
| 5 | Daniel Hemel (Chicago) | 114,323 | David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.) | 4,260 |
| 6 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 109,145 | Dan Shaviro (NYU) | 4,084 |
| 7 | Cliff Fleming (BYU) | 104,102 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 3,784 |
| 8 | David Kamin (NYU) | 103,554 | Ari Glogower (Ohio State) | 3,632 |
| 9 | Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings) | 101,342 | Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings) | 3,544 |
| 10 | Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) | 100,266 | Cliff Fleming (BYU) | 3,186 |
| 11 | Ari Glogower (Ohio State) | 98,966 | Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) | 3,180 |
| 12 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 43,708 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 3,056 |
| 13 | D. Dharmapala (Chicago) | 37,884 | Richard Ainsworth (BU) | 2,472 |
| 14 | Paul Caron (Pepperdine) | 36,173 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 2,399 |
| 15 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 32,498 | D. Dharmapala (Chicago) | 2,167 |
| 16 | Richard Ainsworth (BU) | 28,689 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 2,103 |
| 17 | Ed Kleinbard (USC) | 26,261 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 1,998 |
| 18 | Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) | 25,827 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 1,941 |
| 19 | Jim Hines (Michigan) | 24,786 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 1,936 |
| 20 | Gladriel Shobe (BYU) | 24,093 | Kyle Rozema (Chicago) | 1,868 |
| 21 | Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.) | 23,853 | Hugh Ault (Boston College) | 1,847 |
| 22 | Richard Kaplan (Illinois) | 23,556 | Yariv Brauner (Florida) | 1,675 |
| 23 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 23,693 | Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indy) | 1,316 |
| 24 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 23,365 | Paul Caron (Pepperdine) | 1,304 |
| 25 | Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) | 22,751 | George Yin (Virginia) | 1,233 |
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/2019/12/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings.html
