How to Fend Off the Summer Doldrums, Count Mouse Clicks

Mouse click rankings for SSRN downloads covering US News law schools ranked from 23 to 100 by Bridget Crawford can be found on Feminist Law Professors (why starting with 23?) and "since it's the boring dog days of summer, and inspired by Professor Crawford," Brian Leiter tabulated the US News top 15 law schools according to gross SSRN downloads. Who's bored enough to fill in the gap between the 15th and 23rd ranked schools?

On the absurdity of all this, an anonymous commenter to one of Morriss's Volokh Conspiracy posts on rankings years ago wrote:

Downloads just aren't the same as actual citations: Setting aside whether even citations mean anything important about scholarship, a citation, at the very least, means that another scholar respected an article enough to reference it in his or her own work. Downloads don't mean the same thing. An abstract could sell a paper as having an entirely new schema for analyzing an area of law, then the paper could turn out to be garbage. But, SSRN would already reflect the paper as influential. Heck, the attached paper could be a blank .PDF with a catchy title, and it would do well.

[JH]