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 November 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) | 237,914 | 1 | Jonathan Choi (USC) | 18,613 |
| 2 | Daniel Hemel (NYU) | 136,596 | 2 | Amy Monahan (Minnesota) | 12,518 |
| 3 | David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) | 130,466 | 3 | Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) | 11,707 |
| 4 | Dan Shaviro (NYU) | 129,845 | 4 | Zachary Liscow (Yale) | 6,281 |
| 5 | Lily Batchelder (NYU) | 129,053 | 5 | Kristin Hickman (Minnesota) | 4,784 |
| 6 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 122,402 | 6 | Daniel Hemel (NYU) | 4,701 |
| 7 | David Kamin (NYU) | 115,788 | 7 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 4,287 |
| 8 | Cliff Fleming (BYU) | 109,532 | 8 | Kim Clausing (UCLA) | 3,895 |
| 9 | Ari Glogower (Northwestern) | 105,868 | 9 | David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) | 3,607 |
| 10 | Manoj Viswanathan (UC-SF) | 105,503 | 10 | D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) | 3,555 |
| 11 | Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) | 105,034 | 11 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 3,539 |
| 12 | D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) | 55,455 | 12 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 3,446 |
| 13 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 51,163 | 13 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 3,261 |
| 14 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 45,083 | 14 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 3,123 |
| 15 | Jonathan Choi (USC) | 43,765 | 15 | David Weisbach (Chicago) | 2,704 |
| 16 | Paul Caron (Pepperdine) | 42,656 | 16 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 2,703 |
| 17 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 42,178 | 17 | Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) | 2,669 |
| 18 | Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.) | 40,782 | 18 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 2,499 |
| 19 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 36,442 | 19 | Brian Galle (Georgetown) | 2,257 |
| 20 | Amy Monahan (Minnesota) | 35,532 | 20 | Andy Grewal (Iowa) | 2,066 |
| 21 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 35,173 | 21 | Jordan Barry (USC) | 2,044 |
| 22 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 33,622 | 22 | Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.) | 1,942 |
| 23 | Kim Clausing (UCLA) | 31,871 | 23 | Edward McCaffery (USC) | 1,934 |
| 24 | Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) | 31,550 | 24 | Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) | 1,910 |
| 25 | Ed Kleinbard (USC) | 30,627 | 25 | Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) | 1,894 |
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:
Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a daily email with links to tax posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
