The University of St. Thomas School of Law is the top U.S. law school for new downloads per author over the past 12 months within the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) online academic database. The ranking, released in April, provides further confirmation of the School of Law’s increasing scholarly impact.
"In recent years, the law school has been busy creating new programs, enhancing the student experience and focusing on positive employment outcomes for our graduates," said Robert Vischer, dean of the School of Law. "Through it all, we have maintained a strong commitment to faculty scholarship, and we now have more evidence that this commitment is having an impact."
According to SSRN's website, St. Thomas Law's 26 faculty authors have averaged 740 downloads over the past year.
The top 14 law schools for new downloads per author are:
- University of St. Thomas School of Law
- George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School
- University of Pennsylvania Law School
- University of Tennessee College of Law
- University of Chicago - Law School
- Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School
- University of California, Davis - School of Law
- University of San Diego School of Law
- University of California, Irvine School of Law
- University of Virginia - School of Law
- University of Southern California Gould School of Law
- Stanford Law School
- Vanderbilt University Law School
- Harvard Law School
Two St. Thomas faculty members in particular, Wulf Kaal and Greg Sisk, stand out for their contributions to the SSRN database. Both are listed among the site’s 100 most downloaded legal scholars in the country over the past year.
Evidence of the law school’s growing scholarly impact has been shown in other recent studies. Last year, St. Thomas was listed No. 23 of 70 in a ranking of the top law school faculties in the country for scholarly citations. In 2015, St. Thomas was ranked 39th in the study.
SSRN is an open-access, online database of early scholarly research for schools and government. Currently, SSRN´s eLibrary consists of more than 863,000 research papers from nearly 400,000 researchers across 30 disciplines.
