SSRN has updated its monthly ranking 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 October 1, 2024) 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 | Recent | ||||
| 1 | Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) | 236,819 | 1 | Jonathan Choi (USC) | 19,307 |
| 2 | Daniel Hemel (NYU) | 136,076 | 2 | Amy Monahan (Minnesota) | 12,749 |
| 3 | David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) | 130,051 | 3 | Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) | 11,729 |
| 4 | Dan Shaviro (NYU) | 129,612 | 4 | Zachary Liscow (Yale) | 6,610 |
| 5 | Lily Batchelder (NYU) | 128,825 | 5 | Kristin Hickman (Minnesota) | 5,020 |
| 6 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 121,965 | 6 | Daniel Hemel (NYU) | 4,518 |
| 7 | David Kamin (NYU) | 115,583 | 7 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 3,980 |
| 8 | Cliff Fleming (BYU) | 109,386 | 8 | David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) | 3,881 |
| 9 | Ari Glogower (Northwestern) | 105,635 | 9 | Kim Clausing (UCLA) | 3,816 |
| 10 | Manoj Viswanathan (UC-SF) | 105,423 | 10 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 3,570 |
| 11 | Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) | 104,843 | 11 | D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) | 3,516 |
| 12 | D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) | 55,048 | 12 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 3,457 |
| 13 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 51,021 | 13 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 3,026 |
| 14 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 44,504 | 14 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 2,954 |
| 15 | Jonathan Choi (USC) | 42,866 | 15 | Jordan Barry (USC) | 2,698 |
| 16 | Paul Caron (Pepperdine) | 42,583 | 16 | David Weisbach (Chicago) | 2,663 |
| 17 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 41,555 | 17 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 2,599 |
| 18 | Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) | 40,656 | 18 | Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) | 2,579 |
| 19 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 36,088 | 19 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 2,544 |
| 20 | Amy Monahan (Minnesota) | 35,038 | 20 | Brian Galle (Georgetown) | 2,126 |
| 21 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 34,962 | 21 | Dan Shaviro (NYU) | 2,063 |
| 22 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 33,228 | 22 | Richard Ainsworth (Boston University) | 1,981 |
| 23 | Kim Clausing (UCLA) | 31,484 | 23 | Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) | 1,962 |
| 24 | Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) | 31,455 | 24 | John Brooks (Fordham) | 1,939 |
| 25 | Ed Kleinbard (USC) | 30,555 | 25 | Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) | 1,892 |
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-Bloomington) 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:
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