My friends at Conglomerate today again exhibited their uncanny perspicacity in three separate posts:

• In Why SSRN Might Be a Superior Measure of Faculty Productivity, Bill Henderson had nice things to say about my forthcoming paper with Bernie Black, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance.  Our paper argues that SSRN download data are highly correlated with traditional measures of faculty performance: (1) reputation surveys, (2) scholarly productivity, and (3) citation counts.  In a comment on our paper, Assessing the SSRN-Based Law School Rankings, Ted Eisenberg notes that the SSRN data are more weakly correlated with the other three measures when it comes to the rankings of the Top 10 and Top 20 law schools.  Bill argues that this may not be because of weaknesses in the SSRN data but rather because the other three measures suffer from a prestige bias that does not infect the SSRN data.  He concludes:

SSRN downloads can be a good way to identify underplaced scholars. Further, law schools with SSRN downloads far in excess of their US News rankings (see Black & Caron, table 15) may have figured out markers for productive scholars that more elite schools tend to ignore. And all the data is there, right before our eyes. In my next post, I will tie this topic into Paul Caron’s & Rafael Gely’s insightful Moneyball analysis.

• In Is Blogging Related to the "X Factor," Christine Hurt referenced prior posts on how to measure whether a law school has a culture of scholarly productivity — the "X Factor" (Vic Fleischer, Bill Henderson, and Gordon Smith).  Christine placed Cincinnati in some pretty select company: 

Take a look at the schools with the most bloggers, and I bet that many of these schools would also be on your list of schools that have the X Factor:

Chicago (14)
UCLA (7)
San Diego (7)
GW (5)
George Mason (5)
Stanford (4)
Northwestern (4)
Ohio State (4)
U.C. Davis (4)
Cincinnati (4)

• In A Meatmarket Auction, Gordon Smith proposed an auction for interview spots at the AALS faculty recruitment conference beginning Friday in Washington, D.C., which generated this comment from Tim Zinnecker:

Perhaps it’s because I’m not at a top-tier law school, but I would favor an NFL-style "draft" rather than an "auction." ("After a dismal year in which less than 15% of its faculty published any scholarship [for the third year in a row], the ABC College of Law and School of Cosmetology drafts as the overall #1 pick at this year’s AALS faculty recruiting conference … Ima Wryter, former EIC of the Michigan Law Review, ex-clerk for Chief Justice Earl Warren Burger, author of six articles in top-ten journals, and a notary public.") I’d also like to see more deans engage in prof-swapping. ("Breaking news — South Texas College of Law has just traded UCC prof Tim Zinnecker, $1.2 million in cash, and a baseball autographed by Roger Clemens, Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, AND Warren Spahn to the Marquette University College of Law for corporate megastar Christine Hurt and an untenured torts prof to be named later. Dan Patrick will have more details on this blockbuster trade tonight on Sportscenter, along with commentaries by Paul Caron, Eugene Volokh, and Brian Leiter.") [A Google search confirms that this is the only time my name has been used in the same sentence as Eugene Volokh and Brian Leiter.]