Paul L. Caron
Dean





Thursday, April 28, 2022

SSRN Tax Professor Rankings

SSRN Logo (2018)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.  Here is the new list (through April 1, 2022) 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)  207,322 1 Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) 8,470
2 Daniel Hemel (Chicago) 124,824 2 Daniel Hemel (Chicago) 5,277
3 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 124,648 3 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 4,262
4 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 124,146 4 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 3,259
5 David Gamage (Indiana-Bloomington) 121,318 5 Kim Clausing (UCLA)     3,091
6 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 114,462 6 Dhammika Dharmapala (Chicago) 3,007
7 David Kamin (NYU) 111,748 7 Kyle Rozema (Washington University) 2,979
8 Cliff Fleming (BYU)    106,873 8 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 2,887
9 Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings) 103,686 9 David Kamin (NYU) 2,848
10 Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) 102,755 10 David Gamage (Indiana-Bloomington) 2,789
11 Ari Glogower (Ohio State) 102,379 11 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 2,745
12 Dhammika Dharmapala (Chicago) 46,998 12 Zachary Liscow (Yale) 2,665
13 Michael Simkovic (USC) 46,583 13 Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) 2,575
14 Paul Caron (Pepperdine) 39,354 14 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 2,519
15 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 36,632 15 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 2,121
16 Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) 34,668 16 Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indianapolis)   2,088
17 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 31,470 17 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 1,823
18 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 28,658 18 Ari Glogower (Ohio State) 1,793
19 Ed Kleinbard (USC) 28,449 19 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 1,695
20 Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) 28,270 20 Francine Lipman (UNLV) 1,674
21 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 27,800 21 Hugh Ault (Boston College) 1,627
22 Jim Hines (Michigan) 26,500 22 Yariv Brauner (Florida) 1,568
23 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 26,067 22 Gregg Polsky (Georgia) 1,521
24 Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.) 25,477 24 Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) 1,495
25 Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) 25,321 25 Michael Simkovic (USC) 1,362

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-Bloomington) 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/2022/04/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings.html

Legal Education, Tax, Tax Prof Rankings | Permalink