Top 50 Law Schools by SSRN Downloads

Brian Leiter's recent ranking of the Most Downloaded Law Faculties, 2006 got me thinking about how to use SSRN downloads to rank law faculties with greater reliability and validity. As he points out, provocatively-entitled articles or corporate finance postings, inter alia, can significantly skew such rankings. He also notes that the top 3 faculty members at each school account for 50%, on average, of that school's downloads, and that that percentage varies significantly from school to school.

I offer a simple solution: omit downloads of the three most-downloaded faculty members at each school when ranking law schools by SSRN downloads. Odd articles (like mine) and potentially unrepresentative faculty members are thereby removed. What is left is a fairly reliable indicator of the depth of each faculty's current articles productivity and visibility. I have computed "recent downloads less top 3" for the 75 top schools by recent downloads as of March 1, 2007. Here are the Top 50 Law Schools, ranked by "recent downloads less top 3."

Rank	School	Downloads
1	Harvard	26,190	0
2	Columbia	19,265	0
3	Yale	15,645	5
4	UCLA	15,120	1
5	Vanderbilt	14,063	8
6	NYU	13,830	8
7	U Chicago	13,665	-3
8	Stanford	11,760	-2
9	U Pennsylvania	11,668	8
10	Georgetown	11,474	2
11	George Washington	11,107	-1
12	U Illinois	10,444	-1
13	UC Berkeley	9,918	3
14	Duke	8,720	5
15	U Minnesota	8,530	0
16	U Texas	7,801	-13
17	Northwestern	7,514	1
18	U San Diego	6,708	4
19	George Mason	6,494	2
20	U Michigan	6,235	4
21	Yeshiva	6,064	5
22	Fordham	6,051	6
23	U Virginia	5,607	4
24	Florida State	5,307	-1
25	U Southern California	5,202	-5
26	Cornell	5,141	4
27	Emory	5,140	-20
28	Boston College	5,069	-3
29	Loyola Los Angeles	4,435	0
30	Temple University	4,381	6
31	Indiana Bloomington	4,133	3
32	Boston University	3,934	-1
33	Chapman	3,833	0
34	Ohio State University	3,463	-25
35	Notre Dame	3,390	4
36	New York Law School	3,360	9
37	U Arizona	3,225	5
38	Case Western Reserve	2,820	-1
39	U Maryland	2,710	11
40	Seton Hall	2,684	7
41	Hofstra	2,509	8
42	U Houston	2,506	-4
43	Washington U St. Louis	2,501	1
44	Brooklyn	2,453	10
45	U Wisconsin	2,395	1
46	UC Davis	2,387	6
47	U Iowa	2,356	4
48	Michigan State	2,083	-13
49	U North Carolina	2,000	15
50	Rutgers Camden	1,927	-10

The right-most column indicates the ranking shift each school experiences by reason of the fact that each school's three most downloaded authors have been omitted. One might think of it as a measure of how much those authors' downloads distort the school's rankings. Thus, for example, Yale, Vanderbilt, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania fare much better when the top 3 authors at all schools are removed. (Yale, ranked 8th on the basis of all recent downloads, ranks 3rd in "recent downloads less top 3," moving up 5 ranks.) This presumably reflects the depth of those faculties' scholarly output in article form.