Paul L. Caron
Dean





Tuesday, October 3, 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 August 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)  223,943 1 Jonathan Choi (USC) 21,185
2 Daniel Hemel (NYU) 130,900 2 Kristin Hickman (Minnesota) 13,873
3 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 127,089 3 Amy Monahan (Minnesota) 12,675
4 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 126,906 4 Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) 11,711
5 David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer) 125,678 5 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 4,438
6 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 118,115 6 Daniel Hemel (NYU) 4,289
7 David Kamin (NYU) 114,050 7 Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) 3,967
8 Cliff Fleming (BYU)    108,280 8 David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer) 3,846
9 Manoj Viswanathan (UC-San Francisco) 104,695 9 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 3,702
10 Ari Glogower (Northwestern) 104,118 10 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 3,577
11 Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) 103,795 11 D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) 3,411
12 D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) 51,223 12 Steve Black (Texas Tech) 3,369
13 Michael Simkovic (USC) 48,188 13 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 3,234
14 Paul Caron (Pepperdine) 41,308 14 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 3,211
15 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 41,018 15 Kim Clausing (UCLA)     3,194
16 Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) 38,424 16 Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) 3,008
17 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 37,250 17 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 2,874
18 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 32,837 18 Brian Galle (Georgetown) 2,488
19 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 31,320 19 Zachary Liscow (Yale) 2,470
20 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 30,435 20 Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) 2,163
21 Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) 30,043 21 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 2,134
22 Ed Kleinbard (USC) 29,673 22 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 2,092
23 Jim Hines (Michigan) 28,351 23 Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) 2,086
24 Kim Clausing (UCLA) 27,354 24 Victoria Haneman (Creighton) 1,994
25 Richard Kaplan (Illinois) 27,353 25 Edward McCaffery (USC) 1,890

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/2023/10/ssrn-tax-professor-rankings-1.html

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