Paul L. Caron
Dean





Wednesday, October 25, 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 October 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)  225,052 1 Jonathan Choi (USC) 21,712
2 Daniel Hemel (NYU) 131,308 2 Kristin Hickman (Minnesota) 14,035
3 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 127,220 3 Amy Monahan (Minnesota) 12,826
4 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 127,078 4 Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) 11,498
5 David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer) 126,119 5 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 4,263
6 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 118,382 6 Daniel Hemel (NYU) 4,143
7 David Kamin (NYU) 114,168 7 Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) 3,825
8 Cliff Fleming (BYU)    108,367 8 David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer) 3,823
9 Manoj Viswanathan (UC-SF) 104,760 9 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 3,660
10 Ari Glogower (Northwestern) 104,241 10 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 3,510
11 Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) 103,860 11 Steve Black (Texas Tech) 3,392
12 D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) 51,467 12 D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) 3,334
13 Michael Simkovic (USC) 48,412 13 Kim Clausing (UCLA)     3,131
14 Paul Caron (Pepperdine) 41,385 14 Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) 3,075
15 Louis Kaplow (Harvard) 41,379 15 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 3,068
16 Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) 38,667 16 Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) 2,909
17 Bridget Crawford (Pace) 37,548 17 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 2,798
18 Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) 33,053 18 Brian Galle (Georgetown) 2,440
19 Brad Borden (Brooklyn) 31,496 19 Zachary Liscow (Yale) 2,438
20 Ruth Mason (Virginia) 30,653 20 Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) 2,187
21 Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) 30,207 21 Lily Batchelder (NYU) 2,054
22 Ed Kleinbard (USC) 29,759 22 Dan Shaviro (NYU) 2,020
23 Jim Hines (Michigan) 28,444 23 Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) 1,948
24 Kim Clausing (UCLA) 27,637 24 Victoria Haneman (Creighton) 1,893
25 Richard Kaplan (Illinois) 27,421 25 Edward McCaffery (USC) 1,880

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.html

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