SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 586 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 April 18, 2009) of the Top 25 U.S. Tax Professors in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and new downloads (within the past 12 months):

		All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
1	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	13,997	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	3257
2	Vic Fleischer (Illinois)	12,092	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	3028
3	James Hines (Michigan)	10,490	Bradley Borden (Washburn)	3002
4	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan)	10,426	Vic Fleischer (Illinois)	2347
5	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	8740	James Hines (Michigan)	2109
6	David Walker (BU)	7936	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	2025
7	David Weisbach (Chicago)	7681	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1935
8	Ed McCaffery (USC)	7394	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	1874
9	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	7122	Karen Burke (San Diego)	1746
10	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	6979	Francine Lipman (Chapman)	1732
11	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	6879	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1706
12	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	6716	Ruth Mason (Connecticut)	1613
13	Steven Bank (UCLA)	5818	Michael Knoll (Penn)	1546
14	David Schizer (Columbia)	5560	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	1371
15	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	5534	David Walker (BU)	1304
16	Bradley Borden (Washburn)	5040	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1189
17	Francine Lipman (Chapman)	4915	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	1187
18	Michael Knoll (Penn)	4752	Ed McCaffery (USC)	1178
19	Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	4537	Steven Bank (UCLA)	1152
20	Terrence Chorvat (G. Mason)	4343	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	1132
21	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	4192	Bryan Camp (Texas Tech)	1055
22	Leandra Lederman (Indiana)	3737	Grayson McCouch (San Diego)	1051
23	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	3490	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	1006
24	Ruth Mason (Connecticut)	3450	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	1004
25	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	3321	Matthew Barrett (Notre Dame)	955

Here are the biggest upward moves in each category from the March 2009 ranking:

All-Time Downloads	Move (Rank)	Recent Downloads	Move (Rank)
Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	+1 (#11)	Bradley Borden (Washburn)	+6 (#19)
		Erik Jensen (Case Western)	+5 (#16)
		Bridget Crawford (Pace)	+2 (#21)
		Jim Hines (Michigan)	+1 (#5)
		Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	+1 (#7)
		Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	+1 (#14)
		Bryan Camp (Texas Tech)	+1 (#21)

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:

• 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 my recent 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:

• The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 38 (2006)
• Are Scholars Better Bloggers? — Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025 (2006)

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

• The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• The Top 15 Graduate Tax Faculties
• The Top 10 Tax Faculty Metro Areas