SSRN has updated its new monthly rankings of 399 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 September 1, 2006) of the Top 25 Tax Faculty in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and new downloads (within the past 12 months):

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 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) thinks we are too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.

For Ted Seto’s faculty-wide (and metropolitan area-wide) analysis of these SSRN tax rankings, see:

• The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• The Top 17 Graduate Tax Faculties
• The Top 10 Tax Faculty Metro Areas