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 March 1, 2025) 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) | 243,546 | 1 | Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan) | 13,186 |
| 2 | Daniel Hemel (NYU) | 138,262 | 2 | Jonathan Choi (USC) | 11,896 |
| 3 | David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) | 131,615 | 3 | Zachary Liscow (Yale) | 7,830 |
| 4 | Dan Shaviro (NYU) | 130,789 | 4 | Amy Monahan (Minnesota) | 7,239 |
| 5 | Lily Batchelder (NYU) | 129,746 | 5 | Kim Clausing (UCLA) | 4,842 |
| 6 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 123,476 | 6 | Daniel Hemel (NYU) | 4,700 |
| 7 | David Kamin (NYU) | 116,361 | 7 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 4,655 |
| 8 | Cliff Fleming (BYU) | 109,975 | 8 | Kristin Hickman (Minnesota) | 4,323 |
| 9 | Ari Glogower (Northwestern) | 106,536 | 9 | D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) | 3,947 |
| 10 | Manoj Viswanathan (UC Law-SF) | 105,759 | 10 | Darien Shanske (UC-Davis) | 3,650 |
| 11 | Rebecca Kysar (Fordham) | 105,544 | 11 | David Gamage (Missouri-Columbia) | 3,524 |
| 12 | Mitchell Kane (NYU) | 102,218 | 12 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 3,475 |
| 13 | D. Dharmapala (UC-Berkeley) | 57,158 | 13 | David Weisbach (Chicago) | 3,368 |
| 14 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 52,304 | 14 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 3,303 |
| 15 | Jonathan Choi (USC) | 46,880 | 15 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 3,273 |
| 16 | Louis Kaplow (Harvard) | 46,608 | 16 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 3,233 |
| 17 | Bridget Crawford (Pace) | 44,012 | 17 | Steve Johnson (Florida State) | 2,766 |
| 18 | Paul Caron (Pepperdine) | 42,997 | 18 | Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) | 2,729 |
| 19 | Richard Ainsworth (Boston Univ.) | 41,603 | 19 | Michael Simkovic (USC) | 2,618 |
| 20 | Robert Sitkoff (Harvard) | 37,667 | 20 | Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) | 2,528 |
| 21 | Amy Monahan (Minnesota) | 37,302 | 21 | Brian Galle (Georgetown) | 2,482 |
| 22 | Brad Borden (Brooklyn) | 36,244 | 22 | Ed Fox (Michigan) | 2,472 |
| 23 | Ruth Mason (Virginia) | 35,220 | 23 | Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) | 2,360 |
| 24 | Kim Clausing (UCLA) | 34,119 | 24 | Richard Pomp (Connecticut) | 2,214 |
| 25 | Vic Fleischer (UC-Irvine) | 31,987 | 25 | Edward McCaffery (USC) | 2,128 |
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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