SSRN has updated its new monthly rankings of 302 American and international law school faculties and 1,500 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN data base.  Here is the new list (through December 1, 2005) of the Top 25 Tax Faculty in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and new downloads (within the past 12 months):

Top 25 Tax Faculty SSRN Rankings
	All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
Tax Faculty (School)	Tax Rank	Overall Rank	Tax Rank	Overall Rank
Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1	43	2	78
Edward McCaffery (USC)	2	92	1	62
David Schizer (Columbia)	3	115	10	191
David Walker (BU)	4	119	12	246
David Weisbach (Chicago)	5	136	9	152
Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	6	140	3	79
Victor Fleischer (UCLA)	7	152	7	128
Steve Bank (UCLA)	8	153	6	112
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	9	164	4	91
Terrence Chorvat (George Mason)	10	176	5	105
Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	11	212	17	322
Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	12	324	11	212
Elizabeth Garrett (USC)	13	327	19	351
Sam Thompson (UCLA)	14	353	–	1269
Barbara Fried (Stanford)	15	363	–	613
Lee Anne Fennell (Illinois)	16	399	18	334
Jeff Strnad (Stanford)	17	406	21	368
Joseph Bankman (Stanford)	18	407	20	363
Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	19	427	13	268
Calvin Johnson (Texas)	20	440	–	663
Tanina Rostain (New York)	21	457	8	143
Kyle Logue (Michigan)	22	473	–	673
Kirk Stark (UCLA)	23	494	15	295
Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	24	514	24	505
Michael Asimow (UCLA)	25	518	–	660
David Duff (Toronto)	–	536	14	291
Susan Pace Hamill (Alabama)	–	624	16	315
Michael Knoll (Pennsylvania)	–	677	25	543
Joseph Dodge (Florida State)	–	806	23	445
Hugh Ault (BC)	–	949	22	408

Note that this ranking includes 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:

• All-Time Papers
• New Papers
• All-Time Downloads Per Paper
• New Downloads Per Paper

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 forthcoming article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. ___ (2005) (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) thinks we are too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.