Paul L. Caron
Dean





Thursday, March 30, 2023

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 March 1, 2023) 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)  218,431 1 Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) 11,852
2 Daniel Hemel (NYU) 129,035 2 Kristin Hickman (Minnesota) 8,079
3 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 126,106 3 Daniel Hemel (NYU) 4,564
4 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 125,963 4 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 4,079
5 David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.) 123,647 5 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 3,166
6 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 116,770 6 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 3,066
7 David Kamin (NYU) 113,262 7 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 2,975
8 Cliff Fleming (BYU)    107,764 8 D. Dharmapala (Chicago) 2,909
9 Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings) 104,396 9 Margaret Ryznar (Indiana-Indy)   2,833
10 Ari Glogower (Northwestern) 103,618 10 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 2,829
11 Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) 103,505 11 David Gamage (Indiana-Bloom.) 2,764
12 D. Dharmapala (Chicago) 49,640 12 Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.) 2,740
13 Michael Simkovic (USC) 47,374 13 Kyle Rozema (Washington University) 2,601
14 Paul Caron (Pepperdine) 40,691 14 Zachary Liscow (Yale) 2,528
15 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 39,348 15 Kim Clausing (UCLA)     2,276
16 Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.) 37,134 16 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 2,190
17 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 35,207 17 Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) 2,173
18 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 31,330 18 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 2,012
19 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 29,829 19 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 1,931
20 Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) 29,541 20 Richard Kaplan (Illinois) 1,814
21 Ed Kleinbard (USC) 29,214 21 Victoria Haneman (Creighton) 1,787
22 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 28,822 22 David Kamin (NYU) 1,665
23 Jim Hines (Michigan) 27,626 23 Brian Galle (Georgetown) 1,651
24 Richard Kaplan (Illinois) 26,803 24 Chris Sanchirico (Penn) 1,611
25 Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) 26,075 25 Edward McCaffery (USC) 1,487

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/2023/03/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings.html

Legal Education, Scholarship, Tax, Tax Prof Rankings, Tax Scholarship | Permalink