SSRN, for example, is utilized disproportionately by scholars working in just a few areas (corporate law, law & economics, intellectual property), and it is utilized by some schools (typically those that excel in corporate law and law & economics) more than others. Papers that are "surveys" or "overviews" of an area often tend to have much higher levels of downloads, presumably because they attract both scholars in other fields and students. Blogs affect SSRN downloads, for both individuals and schools. And sometimes just a handful of individuals have a huge impact on a school’s download rank.
The data below notes the 15 most downloaded schools during all of 2006. After the top 15, the numbers start dropping off and are disproportionately affected by single individuals (consider: Lucian Bebchuk had more downloads in 2006 than all the Boalt faculty who posted on SSRN!). The three most downloaded authors at each school are noted, as well as the percentage of all the school’s downloads for which they account. In most cases, as the reader will see, the top three faculty account for roughly 50% of all downloads, with some exceptions (e.g., Texas at one extreme, NYU and Penn at the other). It was necessary to exclude Ohio State and Emory, whose presence in the top 15 was due entirely to one provocatively titled article by Christopher Fairman [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=896790] who teaches at Ohio State and is visiting at Emory; without Fairman’s paper, neither Ohio State nor Emory would be close to the top 15.
So although I am a skeptic about SSRN downloads as a measure of scholarly performance or quality, in the catholic spirit of this ranking site, I offer this data for consideration.
| Rank |
Law School |
Total Downloads in 2006 (in thousands) (rounded) |
Three Most Downloaded Faculty (in thousands) (rounded) |
% of Total Accounted for by Top Three |
Faculty Scholarly Impact Rank (2005) |
| 1 |
Harvard University |
50.8 |
L. Bebchuk (17.4)
R. Kraakman (4.7)
S.Shavell (4.6)
|
53% |
3 |
| 2 |
Columbia University |
31.0 |
T. Wu (5.2)
J. Coffee (5.1)
R. Gilson (4.0) |
46% |
7 |
| 3 |
University of Texas, Austin |
29.2 |
B. Black (12.0)
B. Leiter (7.4)
H. Hu (2.0) |
73% |
9 |
| 4 |
University of Chicago |
28.9 |
C. Sunstein (7.7)
E. Posner (4.4)
R. Posner (3.1) |
53% |
1 |
| 5 |
University of California, Los Angeles |
28.2 |
S. Bainbridge (8.7)
L. Stout (3.1)
R. Korobkin (1.7) |
48% |
15 |
| 6 |
Stanford University |
26.6 |
M. Lemley (8.4)
R. Gilson (4.0)
M. Klausner (2.7) |
57% |
4 |
| 7 |
Yale University |
24.8 |
H. Hansmann (3.8)
R. Romano (3.6)
J. Donohue (2.7)
|
41% |
2 |
| 8 |
George Washington University |
22.7 |
D. Solove (5.3)
O. Kerr (3.3)
D. Clark (2.8) |
50% |
16 |
| 9 |
Georgetown University |
21.0 |
G. Sidak (3.6)
R. Barnett (3.3)
W. Bratton (3.1) |
48% |
8 |
| 10 |
University of Illinois |
20.9 |
L. Ribstein (6.4)
L. Solum (3.0)
J. Kesan (1.5) |
52% |
19 |
| 11 |
University of Minnesota |
18.3 |
F. Parisi (5.1)
D. Burk (3.1)
B. Bix (1.7) |
54% |
23 |
| 12 |
New York University |
18.1 |
S. Choi (2.2)
M. Kahan (1.7)
O. Bar-Gill (1.3) |
28% |
6 |
| 13 |
Vanderbilt University |
16.7 |
R. Thomas (2.7)
M. Blair (2.6)
C. Yoo (2.2) |
45% |
19 |
| 14 |
University of Pennsylvania |
16.3 |
P. Robinson (1.9)
D. Skeel (1.9)
G. Parchomovsky (1.5) |
33% |
22 |
| 15 |
University of California, Berkeley |
15.8 |
J. Fried (3.6)
J. Yoo (2.2)
R. Merges (1.1) |
44% |
5 |
This is limited to schools with at least 30 new papers posted during 2006.
Rank |
Law School |
Total Downloads Per Paper |
Total New Papers in 2006 |
1 |
University of Texas, Austin |
137 |
59 |
2 |
Columbia University |
94 |
93 |
3 |
Northern Kentucky University (Chase College of Law) |
92 |
40 |
4 |
Stanford University |
84 |
57 |
5 |
Yale University |
83 |
75 |
6 |
Harvard University |
82 |
136 |
|
University of Chicago |
82 |
76 |
8 |
George Washington University |
81 |
81 |
9 |
University of California, Los Angeles |
76 |
69 |
| 10 |
University of Colorado, Bolder |
75 |
34 |
| 11 |
Georgetown University |
74 |
76 |
| 12 |
University of Minnesota |
72 |
76 |
| 13 |
University of Illinois |
69 |
74 |
| 14 |
University of Southern California |
67 |
30 |
15 |
Northwestern University |
65 |
59 |
