SSRN has updated its monthly rankings 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 December 11, 2011) 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 Downloads |
|
Recent Downloads |
|
|
1 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.) |
22,631 |
Ed Kleinbard (USC) |
5718 |
|
2 |
Paul Caron (Cincinnati) |
17.982 |
Ted Seto (Loyola-LA) |
4900 |
|
3 |
Louis Kaplow (Harvard) |
17,809 |
Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.) |
4481 |
|
4 |
Vic Fleischer (Colorado) |
16,128 |
Paul Caron (Cincinnati) |
3431 |
|
5 |
James Hines (Michigan) |
15,092 |
Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.) |
2869 |
|
6 |
Ted Seto (Loyola-LA) |
14,062 |
Richard Kaplan (Illinois) |
2709 |
|
7 |
Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis) |
12,750 |
Jen Kowal (Loyola-LA) |
2701 |
|
8 |
Richard Kaplan (Illinois) |
11,680 |
Herwig Schlunk (Vand.) |
2554 |
|
9 |
David Walker (Boston U.) |
11,051 |
Carter Bishop (Suffolk) |
2244 |
|
10 |
Chris Sanchirico (Penn) |
11,011 |
Bridget Crawford (Pace) |
2203 |
|
11 |
David Weisbach (Chicago) |
10,741 |
Louis Kaplow (Harvard) |
2132 |
|
12 |
Francine Lipman (UNLV) |
10,430 |
Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis) |
1905 |
|
13 |
Herwig Schlunk (Vand.) |
10,243 |
Francine Lipman (Chapman) |
1864 |
|
14 |
Carter Bishop (Suffolk) |
9938 |
Brad Borden (Brooklyn) |
1822 |
|
15 |
Ed McCaffery (USC) |
9712 |
Amy Monahan (Minnesota) |
1737 |
|
16 |
Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) |
9508 |
Vic Fleischer (Colorado) |
1623 |
|
17 |
Katie Pratt (Loyola-LA) |
9412 |
James Hines (Michigan) |
1570 |
|
18 |
Brad Borden (Brooklyn) |
9136 |
Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore) |
1518 |
|
19 |
Steve Bank (UCLA) |
8545 |
Jeffrey Maine (Maine) |
1395 |
|
20 |
Jen Kowal (Loyola-LA) |
8492 |
Erik Jensen (Case Western) |
1377 |
|
21 |
Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore) |
8295 |
John Miller (Idaho) |
1317 |
|
22 |
Bridget Crawford (Pace) |
8230 |
Allison Christians (Wisc.) |
1307 |
|
23 |
Dan Shaviro (NYU) |
8044 |
Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) |
1259 |
|
24 |
Michael Knoll (Penn) |
7466 |
David Weisbach (Chicago) |
1259 |
|
25 |
David Schizer (Columbia) |
6855 |
Steve Willis (Florida) |
1215 |
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) 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:
- 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:
