SSRN Tax Professor Download Rankings

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 March 1, 2012) 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.)	23,682	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	6699
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	18,651	Ted Seto (Loyola-LA)	4898
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	18,271	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	4407
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	16,407	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3117
5	James Hines (Michigan)	15,463	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2634
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-LA)	14,467	Jen Kowal (Loyola-LA)	2471
7	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	13,086	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	2406
8	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	11,948	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2299
9	David Walker (Boston U.)	11,314	Herwig Schlunk (Vand.)	2280
10	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	11,266	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2248
11	David Weisbach (Chicago)	11,078	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	2020
12	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	10,766	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	1836
13	Herwig Schlunk (Vand.)	10,544	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1753
14	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	10,363	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	1672
15	Katie Pratt (Loyola-LA)	10,024	Francine Lipman (Chapman)	1669
16	Ed McCaffery (USC)	9824	James Hines (Michigan)	1594
17	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	9806	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1486
18	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	9413	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1357
19	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	9064	Allison Christians (Wisc.)	1319
20	Steve Bank (UCLA)	8721	Daniel Shaviro (NYU)	1319
21	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	8656	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	1309
22	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	8593	David Gamage (UCBerkeley)	1298
23	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	8411	Christopher Hoyt (UMKC)	1248
24	Michael Knoll (Penn)	7654	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	1239
25	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	7039	Amy Monahan (Minnesota)	1236

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: